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Page 106 



MRS. PANKHURST'S GREATEST PARADE 

When she led 40,000 English women through the streets of 
London in July, 1915. This procession is the vanguard in the 
march of all the women of the world to economic independence. 



WOMEN WANTED 

The story written in blood red 

letters on the horizon of the 

Great World War 



BY 

MABEL POTTER DAGGETT 

AUTHOR OF "IN LOCKERBIE STREET," ETC. 



Illustrated 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



} 



COPYRIGHT, 1918, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



COPYRIGHT, 1917, 1918, 
BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

JUN -6 1918 






'FN 



©GI.A497 645 



To My Friend 
KATHERINE LECKIE 

THE ILLUMINATION OF 

WHOSE PERSONALITY HAS 

LIGHTED MY PATHWAY TO 

TRUTH, THIS BOOK IS 

AFFECTIONATELY 

DEDICATED 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Glimpsing the Great World War ... 13 

II Close Up Behind the Lines 48 

III Her Country's Call 82 

IV Women Who Wear War Jewelry . . .115 
V The New Wage Envelope 147 

VI The Open Door in Commerce 201 

VII Taking Title in the Professions . . . 239 

VIII At the Gates of Government .... 280 

IX The Rising Value of a Baby ..... 308 

X The Ring and the Woman ..... 338 



vii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Mrs. Pankhurst's Greatest Parade the 
March of the English Women into 
Industry Frontispiece 

PAGE 

The Staff of the Women's War Hospital, Endell 

St. W. C, London 64 

Mrs. H. J. Tennant of London 96 

Viscountess Elizabeth Benoit D'Azy of Paris in 

the Red Cross Service .... ... 120 

Lady Ralph Paget, Celebrated War Heroine . . 128 

Mrs. Katherine M. Harley of London, Who Died 

at the Front 136 

Miss Elizabeth Rachel Wylie of New York . . 202 

Mlle. Sanua at the Head of the Paris School of 

Commerce for Women 224 

Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, England's First 

Woman Physician 256 

Miss Nancy Nettleford of London 264 

Mme. Suzanne Grinberg of Paris, Famous Lawyer 272 

Dr. Rosalie S. Morton of New York ]/. . 276 

ix 



PAGE 



x ILLUSTRATIONS 

Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett of London . . 290 

Mme. Charles Le Verrier of Paris 298 

Dr. Schiskina Yavein of Petrograd 304 

Her Grace the Duchess of Marlborough . . . 320 



WOMEN WANTED 



WOMEN WANTED 

CHAPTER I 

Glimpsing the Great World War 

"Who goes there?" 

I hear it yet, the ringing challenge from the war 
offices of Europe. Automatically my hand slides 
over my left hip. But to-day my tailored skirt 
drapes smoothly there. 

The chamois bag that for months has bulged be- 
neath is gone. As regularly as I fastened my garters 
every morning I have been wont to buckle the safety 
belt about my waist and straighten the bag at my 
side and feel with careful fingers for its tight shut 
clasp. You have to be thoughtful like that when 
you're carrying credentials on which at any moment 
your personal safety, even your life may depend. 
As faithfully as I looked under the bed at night I 
always counted them over: my letter of credit for 
$3,000, my blue enveloped police book, and my pass- 
port criss-crossed with vises in the varied colours of 
all the rubber stamps that must officially vouch for 
me along my way. Ah, they were still all there. 
And with a sigh of relief I was wont to retire to my 

13 



14 WOMEN WANTED 

pillow with the sense of one more day safely done. 

The long steel lines I have passed, I cannot for- 
get. "Who goes there?" These that speak with 
authority are men with pistols in their belts and 
swords at their sides. And there are rows of them, O 
rows and rows of them along the way to the front. 
See the cold glitter of them ! I still look nervously 
first over one shoulder and then over the other. This 
morning at breakfast a waiter only drops a fork. 
And I jump at the sound as if a shot had been fired. 
You know the feeling something's going to catch 
you if you don't watch out. Well, you have it like 
that for a long time after you've been in the war 
zone. Will it be a submarine or a Zeppelin or a 
khaki clad line of steel*? 

It was on a summer's day in 1916 that I rushed 
into the office of the Pictorial Review. "Look!" I 
exclaimed excitedly to the editor at his desk. "See 
the message in the sky written in letters of blood 
above the battlefields of Europe! There it is, the 
promise of freedom for women !" 

He brushed aside the magazine "lay-out" before 
him, and lifted his eyes to the horizon of the world. 
And he too saw. Among the feminists of New York 
he has been known as the man with the vision. 
"Yes," he agreed, "you are right. It is the wonder 
that is coming. Will you go over there and find 
out just what this terrible cataclysm of civilisation 
means to the woman's cause?" 

And he handed me my European commission. 
The next morning when I applied for my passport 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 15 

I began to be written down in the great books of 
judgment which the chancelleries of the nations keep 
to-day. Hear the leaves rustle as the pages chron- 
icle my record in full. I must clear myself of the 
charge of even a German relative-in-law. I must 
be able to tell accurately, say, how many blocks 
intervene between the Baptist Church and the city 
hall in the town where I was born. They want to 
know the colour of my husband's eyes. They will 
ask for all that is on my grandfather's tombstone. 
They must have my genealogy through all my great- 
est ancestors. I have learned it that I may tell it 
glibly. For I shall scarcely be able to go round the 
block in Europe, you see, without meeting some mili- 
tary person who must know. 

Even in New York, every consul of the countries 
to which I wish to proceed, puts these inquiries be- 
fore my passport gets his vise. It is the British con- 
sul who is holding his in abeyance. He fixes me 
with a look, and he charges: "You're not a suffra- 
gist, are you? Well," he goes on severely, "they 
don't want any trouble over there. I don't know 
what they'll do about you over there." And his 
voice rises with his disapproval: "I don't at all 
know that I ought to let you go." 

But finally he does. And he leans across his desk 
and passes me the pen with which to "sign on the 
dotted line." It is the required documentary evi- 
dence. He feels reasonably sure now that the Kaiser 
and I wouldn't speak if we passed by. And for the 
rest? Well, all governments demand to know very 



16 WOMEN WANTED 

particularly who goes there when it happens to be 
a woman. You're wishing trouble on yourself to 
be a suffragist almost as much as if you should elect 
to be a pacifist or an alien enemy. There is a pre- 
vailing opinion — which is a hang-over from say 1908 
— that you may break something, if it is only a mili- 
tary rule. Why are you wandering about the world 
anyhow? You'll take up a man's place in the boat 
in a submarine incident. You'll be so in the way 
in a bombardment. And you'll eat as much sugar 
in a day as a soldier. So, do your dotted lines as 
you're told. 

They dance before my eyes in a dotted itinerary. 
It stretches away and away into far distant lands, 
where death may be the passing event in any day's 
work. I shall face eternity from, say, the time that 
I awake to step into the bath tub in the morning un- 
til, having finished the last one hundredth stroke 
with the brush at night, I lay my troubled head on 
the pillow to rest uneasily beneath a heavy maga- 
zine assignment. "There's going to be some risk," 
the editor of the Pictorial Review said to me that 
day in his office, with just a note of hesitation in his 
voice. 'Til take it," I agreed. 

The gangway lifts in Hoboken. We are cutting 
adrift from the American shore. Standing at the 
steamship's rail, I am gazing down into faces that 
are dear. Slowly, surely they are dimming through 
the ocean's mists. Shall I ever again look into eyes 
that look back love into mine? 

I think, right here, some of the sparkle begins to 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 17 

fade from the great adventure on which I am em- 
barked. We are steaming steadily out to sea. 
Whither? It has commenced, that anxious thought 
for every to-morrow, that is with a war zone trav- 
eller even in his dreams. A cold October wind whips 
full in my face. I shiver and turn up my coat collar. 
But is it the wind or the pain at my heart? I can 
no longer see the New York sky line for the tears 
in my eyes. And I turn in to my stateroom. 

There on the white counterpane of my berth 
stretches a life preserver thoughtfully laid out by 
my steward. On the wall directly above the wash- 
stand, a neatly printed card announces: "The oc- 
cupant of this room is assigned to Lifeboat 17 on the 
starboard side." It makes quite definitely clear the 
circumstances of ocean travel. This is to be no holi- 
day jaunt. One ought at least to know how to wear 
a life preserver. Before I read my steamer letters, 
I try mine on. It isn't a "perfect 36." "But they 
don't come any smaller," the steward says. "You 
just have to fold them over so," and he ties the 
strings tight. Will they hold in the highest sea, I 
wonder. 

The signs above the washstands, I think, have been 
seen by pretty nearly every one before lunch time. 
When we who are taking the Great Chance together, 
assemble in the dining-room, each of us has glimpsed 
the same shadowy figure at the wheel in the pilot 
house. We all earnestly hope it will be the cap- 
tain who will take us across the Atlantic. But we 



18 WOMEN WANTED 

know also that it may be the ghostly figure of the 
boatman Charon who will take us silently across the 
Styx. 

Whatever else we may do on this voyage, we shall 
have to be always going-to-be-drowned. It is a 
curiously continuously present sensation. I don't 
know just how many of my fellow travellers go to 
bed at night with the old nursery prayer in their 
minds if not on their lips. But I know that for me 
it is as vivid as when I was four years old: 

Now I lay me down to sleep 
I pray the Lord my soul to keep. 
And should I die before I wake, 
I pray the Lord my soul to take. 

Each morning I awake in faint surprise that I am 
still here in this same seasick world. The daily 
promenade begins with a tour of inspection to one's 
personal lifeboat. Everybody does it. You wish 
to make sure that it has not sprung a leak over night. 
Then you lean over the steamship's rail to look for 
the great letters four feet high and electrically il- 
luminated after dark, for all prowling undersea Ger- 
man craft to notice that this is the neutral New Am- 
sterdam of the Holland-American line. Submarine 
warfare has not yet reached its most savage climax. 
Somebody says with confident courage : "Now that 
makes us quite safe, don't you think?" And some- 
body answers as promptly as expected. "Oh, I'm 
sure they wouldn't sink us when they see that sign." 
And no one speaks the thought that's plain in every 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 19 

face : "But Huns make 'mistakes.' And remember 
the Lusitania" 

We always are remembering the Lusitania. I 
never dress for dinner at night without recalling: 
And they went down in evening clothes. We play 
cards. We dance on deck. But never does one 
completely while away the recurring thought: 
Death snatched them as suddenly as from this my 
next play or as from the Turkey Trot or the Maxixe 
that the band is just beginning. 

We read our Mr. Britlings but intermittently. 
The plot in which we find ourselves competes with 
the best seller. Subconsciously I am always listen- 
ing for the explosion. If the Germans don't do it 
with a submarine, it may be a floating mine that the 
last storm has lashed loose from its moorings. 

What is this? Rumour spreads among the steam- 
er chairs. Everybody rises. Little groups gather 
with lifted glasses. And — it is a piece of driftwood 
sighted on the wide Atlantic. That thrill walks off 
in about three times around the deck. 

But what is that, out there, beyond the steamer's 
path"? Right over there where the fog is lifting? 
Surely, yes, that shadowy outline. Don't you see 
it? Why, it's growing larger every minute. I be- 
lieve it is! Oh, yes, I'm sure they look like that. 
W 7 ait. Well, if it were, it does seem as if the tor- 
pedo would have been here by now. Ah, we shall 
not be sunk this time after all ! Our periscope 
passes. It is clearly now only a steamship's funnel 
against the horizon. 



20 WOMEN WANTED 

Then one day there is an unusual stir of activity 
on deck. The sailors are stripping the canvas from 
off the lifeboats. The great crane is hauling the life 
rafts from out the hold. Oh, what, is going to hap- 
pen 4 ? The most nervous passenger wants right away 
to know. And the truthful answer to her query is, 
that no one can tell. But we are making ready now 
for shipwreck. In these days, methodically, like this 
it is done. It has to be, as you approach the more 
intense danger zone of a mined coast. You see you 
never can tell. 

I go inside once more to try the straps of my life 
preserver. But we are sailing through a sunlit sea. 
And at dinner the philosopher at our table — he is a 
Hindu from Calcutta — says smilingly, "Now this 
will do very nicely for shipwreck weather, gentle- 
men, very nicely for shipwreck weather." It is the 
round-faced Hollander at. my right, of orthodox 
Presbyterian faith, who protests earnestly, "Ah, but 
please no. Do not jest." The next day when the 
dishes slide back and forth between the table racks, 
none of us laugh when the Hollander says solemnly, 
"See, but if God should call us now." Ah, if he 
should, our life boats would never last us to Heaven. 
They would crumple like floats of paper in Nep- 
tune's hand. Eating our dessert, we look out on 
the terrible green and white sea that licks and slaps 
at the portholes and all of us are very still. The 
lace importer from New York at my left, is the 
most quiet of all. 

For eight days and nights we have escaped all 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 21 

the perils of the deep. And now it is the morning 
of the ninth day. You count them over like that 
momentously as God did when he made the world. 
What will to-morrow bring forth ? Well, one pre- 
pares of course for landing. 

I sit up late, nervously censoring my note book 
through. The nearer we get to the British coast, 
the more incriminating it appears to be familiar with 
so much as the German woman movement. I dig 
my blue pencil deep through the name of Frau Cauer. 
I rip open the package of my letters of introduction. 
W 7 hat will they do to a person who is going to meet 
a pacifist by her first name *? That's a narrow escape. 
Another letter is signed by a perfectly good loyal 
American who, however, has the misfortune to have 
inherited a Fatherland name from some generations 
before. Oh, I cannot afford to be acquainted with 
either of my friends. I've got to be pro-ally all 
wool and yard wide clear to the most inside seams 
of my soul. I've got to avoid even the appearance 
of guilt. So, stealthily I tiptoe from my stateroom 
to drop both compromising letters into the sea. 

Like this a journalist goes through Europe these 
days editing oneself, to be acceptable to the rows 
of men in khaki. So I edit and I edit and I edit my- 
self until after midnight for the British government's 
inspection. I try to think earnestly, What would 
a spy do*? So that I may avoid doing it. And I 
go to bed so anxious lest I act like a spy that I dream 
I am one. When I awake on the morning of the 
tenth day, all our engines are still. And from bow 



22 WOMEN WANTED 

to stern, our boat is all a-quiver with glad excite- 
ment. We have not been drowned! There beside 
us dances the little tender to take us ashore at Fal- 
mouth. 

FACING THE STEEL LINE OF INQUIRY 

The good safe earth is firm beneath our feet be- 
fore the lace importer speaks. Then, looking out 
on the harbor, he says: "On my last business trip 
over a few months since, my steamship came in here 
safely. But the boat ahead and the next behind 
each struck a mine." So the chances of life are like 
that, sometimes as close as one in three. But while 
you take them as they come, there are lesser difficul- 
ties that it's a great relief to have some one to do 
something about. At this very moment I am de- 
voutly glad for the lace importer near at hand. He 
is carrying my bag and holding his umbrella over 
me in the rain. For, you see, he is an American 
man. The more I have travelled, the more certain 
I have become that it's a mistake to be a woman any- 
where in the world there aren't American men 
around. In far foreign lands I have found myself 
instinctively looking round the landscape for their 
first aid. The others, I am sure, mean well. But 
they aren't like ours. An Englishman gave me his 
card last night at dinner: "Now if I can do any- 
thing for you in London," he said, and so forth. It 
was the American man now holding his umbrella 
over me in the rain, who came yesterday to my 
steamer chair: "It's going to be dark to-morrow 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 23 

night in London," he said, "and the taxicabs are 
scarce. You must let me see that you reach your 
hotel in safety." And I felt as sure a reliance in 
him as if we'd made mud pies together or he'd car- 
ried my books to school. You see, you count on an 
American man like that. 

But the cold line of steel ! That you have to do 
alone, even as you go each soul singly to the judg- 
ment gate of heaven. I grip my passport hard. It 
has been removed from its usual place of secure 
safety. Chamois bags are the eternal bother of 
being a woman abroad in war time. Men have 
pockets, easy ones to get at informally. I have 
among my "most important credentials" — they are 
in separate packages carefully labelled like that — 
a special "diplomatic letter" commending me offi- 
cially by the Secretary of State to the protection of 
all United States embassies and consulates. When 
they handed it to me in Washington, I remember 
they told me significantly: "We have just picked 
out of prison over there, two American correspond- 
ents whose lives we were able to save by the nar- 
rowest chance. We don't want any international 
complications. Now, do be careful." 

I'm going to be. The Tower of London and some 
modern Bastille on the banks of the Seine and divers 
other dark damp places of detention over here are 
at this minute clearly outlining themselves as moving 
pictures before my mind. I earnestly don't want 
to be in any of them. 

We have reached the temporary wooden shack 



24 WOMEN WANTED 

through which governments these days pass all who 
knock for admission at their frontiers. Inside the 
next room there at a long pine table sit the men with 
pistols in their belts and swords at their sides, whose 
business it is to get spies when they see them. We 
are to be admitted one by one for the relentless fire 
of their cross-questioning. They have taken "Brit- 
ish subjects first." Now they summon "aliens." 

To be called an alien in a foreign land feels at 
once like some sort of a charge. You never were 
convicted of this before. And it seems like the 
most unfortunate thing you can possibly be now. 
Besides, I am every moment becoming more acutely 
conscious of my mission. The rest of these my fel- 
low travellers, it is true, are aliens. I am worse. 
For a journalist even in peace times appears a most 
suspiciously inquiring person who wishes to know 
everything that should not be found out. But in 
peace times one has only to handle individuals. In 
war times one has to handle governments. The bur- 
den of proof rests heavier and heavier upon me. 
How shall I convince England that in spite of all, 
I can be a most harmless, pleasant person*? 

From the decision the other side of that door, there 
will be no appeal. The men in khaki there have 
authority to confiscate my notes — or me ! And they 
are so particular about journalists. One friend of 
mine back from the front a month ago had his 
clothes turned inside out and they ripped the lining 
from his coat. Then there is the lemon acid bath, 
lest you carry notes in invisible writing on your 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 25 

skin. They do it, rumor says, in Germany. But 
who can tell when other War Offices will have 
adopted this efficiency method*? Oh, dear, what is 
the use not to have been drowned if one must face 
an inquisition? And they may turn me back on 
the next boat. My thoughts are with the lemon 
acid bath. How many lemons will it take to fill 
the tub, I am speculatively computing, when "Next," 
says the soldier. And it is I. 

A battery of searching eyes is turned on me. I 
am face to face with my first steel line. The words 
of the British consul again ring warningly in my 
ears, C T don't at all know what they'll do about you 
over there." 

No one ever does know these days. It's the tor- 
menting uncertainty that keeps you literally guess- 
ing from day to day whether you're going or com- 
ing. And on what least incidents does human judg- 
ment depend. Perhaps they'd like me better if my 
hat were blue instead of brown. Thank heaven I 
didn't economise on the price of my travelling coat. 
I step bravely forward when the officer at the head 
of the table reaches out his hand for my passport. 

In the upper left hand corner is attached my pho- 
tograph. The Department of State at Washington 
requires it for all travellers now before they affix the 
great red seal that gives authenticity to the personal 
information recorded in this paper. From the pass- 
port photograph to my face, the officer glances 
sharply, suspiciously, like a bank teller looking for 
a forgery. I feel him looking straight through me 



26 WOMEN WANTED 

to the very curl at the back of my neck. Ah, appar- 
ently it is I ! 

"Now what have you come over here for?" he in- 
quires in a tone of voice that seems to say, "Nobody 
asked you to England. We're quite too busy about 
other things to entertain strangers." 

I hand him my official journalistic letter addressed 
"To Whom it may Concern." Signed by the edi- 
tor of the Pictorial Review, it states that I am dele- 
gated to study the new position of women due to 
the war. Will he want me to? He may be as 
sensitive as the British consul in New York about 
the woman movement. He may prefer that it 
should not move at all. 

I hold my breath while he reads the letter. Then 
I have to talk. I tell him, I think, the complete 
story of my life. I show him all of my credentials. 
I give him my photograph. You always have to 
do that. Photographs that are duplicates of the one 
on your passport, you must carry by the dozen. You 
have to leave them like visiting cards with gentlemen 
in khaki all over Europe. 

Well, what is he going to do about me? I get 
out my letters of social introduction. There are 84 ! 
I strew them on the table for him to read. There 
is a door just behind his head. Will it be in there, 
the search and the confiscation and the lemon acid 
bath? I wonder, and I wonder. But I try to 
stand very still. If I move one foot, it might jar 
the decision that is forming in the officer's mind. I 
am watching alertly for his expression. But there 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 27 

isn't any. I can't tell at all whether he likes me. 
An Englishman is always like that, completely shut 
up behind his face. It may be at this very moment 
he has made up his mind that I am a spy. He has 
read only four letters — 

And he looks up suddenly, in his hand the letter 
from Mrs. Belmont in New York introducing me to 
the Duchess of Marlborough. He nods down the 
line to all the other military eyes fixed on me: 
"She's all right. Let her go." 

I sign on the dotted line. And everything is over ! 
In a flashing moment like that, it is accomplished. 
And a letter to "Our Duchess" has done it. At the 
magic of the name of the American woman who was 
Consuelo Vanderbilt, this steel like line of British 
officers quietly sheathes all opposition ! 

The soldier at the other end of the room opens a 
little wooden door in a wooden wall that lets me 
into England. My baggage is already being chalk 
marked "passed." I am here! I clutch my pass- 
port happily and convulsively in my hand. You 
have to do that until you can restore it to the safer 
place. It's the most important item in what the 
French call your "pieces de identities At any mo- 
ment a policeman in the Strand, a gendarme in the 
Avenue de l'Opera may tap an alien on the shoul- 
der with the pertinent inquiry, Who are you? 

THE WAY OF JOURNALISM IN WAR TIME NOT EASY 

London, when we reached it that night in October, 
lay under the black pall of darkness in which the 



28 WOMEN WANTED 

cities over here have enveloped themselves against 
war. Death rides above in the sky. To-night, 
every to-night, it may be the Zeppelins will come. 
Over there on the horizon, a searchlight streams sud- 
denly and another and another, their great fingers 
feeling through the black clouds for the monsters of 
destruction that may be winging a way above the 
chimney pots. Every building is tightly shuttered. 
The street lamps with their globes painted three 
quarters black have their pale lights as it were hid 
beneath an inverted bushel. Pedestrians must de- 
velop a protective sense that enables them to find 
their way at night as a cat does in the dark. "I'm 
sorry," says an apologetic English voice, and before 
you know it, you have bumped against another 
passerby. There is another sudden jolt. And you 
are scrambling for your balance the other side of the 
curb you couldn't see was there. If you are familiar 
with the door knob where you're going to stop, you 
will be so much the surer where you're at. 

Looking out on this darkest London from Pad- 
dington railway station at midnight I sit on my trunk 
and wait. Do you remember the popular song, 
There's a Little Street in Heaven Called Broadway? 
Oh, I hope there is. 

I sit on my trunk and wait. In my handbag is 
the card of the Englishman politely ready to look 
after me in London. It is the American man who is 
out there in the night endeavouring to commandeer 
a taxicab. Somehow he has done it. At last the 
cab comes. He has compelled the chauffeur to take 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 29 

us. I shall not have to sit all night on my trunk. 

A small green light within the hooded entrance, 
picks the Ritz Hotel out of the Piccadilly blackness. 
Inside, after the gloom through which we have come, 
I gasp with relief. It is as if one discovers suddenly 
in a place that has seemed a graveyard, Why, people 
still live here ! Right then at the hotel register, the 
voice of Scotland Yard speaks for the War Office. 
And before the Ritz can be permitted to give me 
refuge from the night, I must answer. The "regis- 
tration blank" presented for me to fill in, demands 
certain definite information : "(1) Surname. (2) 
Christian names. (3) Nationality. (4) Birthplace. 
(5) Year of birth. (6) Sex. (7) Full residen- 
tial address: Full business address. (8) Trade or 
occupation. (9) Served in what army, navy or po- 
lice force. (10) Full address where arrived from. 
(11) Date of signing. (12) Signature." And a 
little below, "(13) Full address of destination. 
(14) Date of departure. (15) Signature." A 
last, line in conspicuous italics admonishes: "Pen- 
alty for failing to give this information correctly 100 
pounds or six months imprisonment." Well, of 
course a threat like that will make even a woman tell 
her age as many times as she is asked. But I do it 
rebelliously against the Kaiser and all his Prussians. 
For the "registration blank" was made in Germany. 
I remember it before the war, at the Hotel Adlon in 
Berlin. 

I must sign now on the dotted line before I can 
even go to bed. I arrange my clothing carefully on 



30 WOMEN WANTED 

a chair within reach of my hand. You rest that way 
in a warring city, always ready to run. The Zeppe- 
lins may come so swiftly. In London you know 
your nearest cellar. In France you have selected 
your high vaulted entrance arch under which to take 
refuge when the sirens go screaming down the street, 
"Gardez vous, Gardez vous." 

The sense of depression that had enwrapped me in 
the first darkness of London was not gone when I 
closed my eyes in sleep. One does not throw it off. 
You may not be of those who are wearing crepe. 
But you cannot escape the woe of the world which 
will enfold you like a garment. 

In the morning the ordinary business of living has 
become one of strenuous detail. The law requires 
that an alien shall register with the police within 24 
hours of arrival. When I have thus established a 
calling acquaintance at the Vine Street station, I go 
out into Piccadilly feeling like a prisoner politely on 
parole. And I face an environment strung all over 
with barbed wire restrictions on my movements. 
Every letter that comes for me from America will be 
read before I receive it, marked "Opened by the Cen- 
sor." If I wish to go away from this country, I 
must ask the permission of the Foreign Office, the 
consulate of the country to which I wish to proceed 
and my own consulate before I can so much as pur- 
chase a ticket. I may not leave London for any "re- 
stricted area" where there has been an Irish revolution 
or a German bombardment without the consent of 
Scotland Yard. I may not even leave the Ritz 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 31 

Hotel, which is registered as my official place of resi- 
dence, for more steam heat at the Savoy, without 
notifying the Vine Street Station of my departure 
and the Bow Street Station of my arrival. The De- 
fence of the Realm and the Trading with the Enemy 
Acts and others in a land at war are lying around 
like bombs all over the place. Have a care that you 
don't run into them ! 

I am alone one evening at the International Suf- 
frage Headquarters in Adam Street, deep lost in a 
sociological study of carefully hied data. Do you 
believe in subconscious warnings'? Anyhow, I am 
bending over a box of manila envelopes when sud- 
denly, out of the silence of this top floor room, I am 
impressed with a sense of danger. It is as plain and 
clear as if a voice over my shoulder said "Look out." 
I do look up quickly. And there on the wall before 
my eyes, I read Order 4 from the Defence of the 
Realm Act, commonly enough posted all over Lon- 
don, I discover later. But this is the first time I 
have seen it. It reads: "The curtains of this room 
must be drawn at sundown." And from two win- 
dows with wide open curtains, my brilliant, electric 
light is streaming out on the London darkness, oh, as 
far as Trafalgar Square for all the German Zeppelins 
and Scotland Yard to see ! Just for an instant I am 
paralysed with the fear of them all. Then my hand 
finds the electric button and I hastily switch myself 
into the protecting darkness. Somehow I grope my 
way through the hall and down the staircase. And I 
slam the outer door hurriedly. There, when the 



32 WOMEN WANTED 

police arrive, I shall be gone ! In the morning paper 
a week or so afterward I read one day of an earl's 
daughter even, who had been arrested and fined 25 
pounds for "permitting a beam of light to escape 
from her window." 

The government is regulating everything, the icing 
a housewife may not put on a cake, the number of 
courses one may have for dinner, even the conversa- 
tion at table. Let an American with the habit of 
free speech beware! Notices conspicuously posted 
in public places advise, "Silence." In France they 
put it most picturesquely, "Say nothing. Be suspi- 
cious. The ears of the enemy are always open." 
Absolutely the only safe rule, then, is to learn to 
hold your tongue. Everybody's doing it over here. 
Very well, I will not talk. But what about all the 
rest of this silent world that will not, either? For 
those under military orders, the rule is absolute. 
And you've no idea how many people are under mili- 
tary orders. This is a war with even the women in 
khaki. I begin to feel that to get into so much as a 
drawing-room, I ought to have my merely social let- 
ter of introduction crossed with some kind of a vise. 
Wouldn't a hostess, even the Duchess of Marlbor- 
ough, be able to be more cordial if she knew that I 
had seen the Government before I saw her? Even 
the girl conductor on the 'bus this morning, when I 
essayed to ask her as Exhibit 1 in the new-woman- 
in-industry I was looking for, how she liked her job, 
turned and scurried down her staircase like a fright- 
ened rabbit. 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 33 

So, this is not to be the simple life for research 
work. And though I come through all the subma- 
rines and the lines of steel, and the Zeppelins have 
not got me yet, what shall it profit me to save my 
life and lose my assignment? I am bound for the 
front and for certain information I am to gather on 
the way. Now, what should a journalist do 4 ? 

Well, a journalist, I discovered, should get one's 
self personally conducted by Lord Northcliffe. 
There were those of my masculine contemporaries 
already headed for the front whom he was said on 
arrival here to have received into the bosom of his 
newspaper office and put to bed to rest from the 
nervous exhaustion of travel, and sent a secretary 
and a check and anything else to make them happy. 
And then he asked them only to name the day they 
wanted to see Woolwich or to cross to France. But 
nothing like that was happening to me. So what 
else should a journalist do*? 

Well, evidently a journalist should get in good 
standing with a war office which alone can press the 
button to everywhere she wants to go. The short 
cut to a war office is through a press bureau. But a 
press bureau modestly shrinks from the publicity that 
it purveys. You do not find it on Main Street with 
a lettered signboard and a hand pointing: "Jour- 
nalists, right this way." And you can't run right 
up the front steps of a war office and ring the bell. 
It would be a what-do-you-call-it, a faux pas if you 
did. Even for a private residence it would be that. 
There isn't anywhere that I know of over here even 



34 WOMEN WANTED 

in peace time that as soon as you reach town you can 
call a hostess up on the telephone and have her say, 
4 'Oh, you're the friend of Sallie Smith that she's 
written me about. Come right along up to dinner." 
Why, the butler would tell you her ladyship or her 
grace or something like that was not at home. It 
just can't be done like that outside of America. 
You don't rush into the best English circles that way, 
much less the English government. Absolutely your 
only way around is through a formal correspond- 
ence. 

One day I wrap myself in the rose satin down 
bedquilt at the Ritz and spread out my letters of 
introduction to choose a journalistic lead. There 
are carved cupids on the walls of this bedroom, and 
a lovely rose velvet carpet on the floor and heavy 
rose silk hanging at the windows. But there isn't 
any place to be warm. The tiny open grate holds 
six or it may be seven coals — you see why Dickens 
always writes of "coals" in the plural — and you put 
them on delicately with things like the sugar tongs. 
It isn't good form to be warm in England. The 
best families aren't. It's plebeian and American 
even to want to be. 

My soul is all curled up with the cold while I am 
trying to determine which letter. This to Sir Gil- 
bert Parker was the 84th letter handed me by the 
editor of the Pictorial Review as I stepped on the 
boat. It is the one I now select first, quite by chance, 
without the least idea of where it is to lead me. The 
next evening at 6 o'clock I am on my way to Well- 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 35 

ington House. "Sir Gilbert," speaks the attendant 
in resplendent livery. And I find myself in a stately 
English room. There, down the length of the red 
velvet carpet, beneath the glow of a red shaded elec- 
tric lamp, a man with very quiet eyes is rising from 
his chair. "Do you know where you are 4 ?" he asks 
with a smile, glancing at the letter of introduction on 
his desk that tells of my mission. "This," he says, 
"is the headquarters of the English government's 
press bureau for the war and I am in charge of the 
American publicity." Who cares for Lord North- 
cliff e now ! Or even the King of England ! Of all 
the inhabitants of this land, here was the man a 
journalist would wish to meet. The man who has 
written "The Seats of the Mighty" sits in them. 
From his desk here in the red room he can touch the 
button that will open all the right doors to me. He 
can't do it immediately, in war time. One has to 
make sure first. I must come often to Wellington 
House. There are days when we talk of many 
things, of life and of New York. He is less and less 
of a formal Englishman. His title is slipping away. 
He is beginning to be just Gilbert Parker, who might 
have belonged to the Authors' League up on Forty- 
second Street. I half suspect he does. "I do know 
my America rather well," he says at length. "I 
married a girl from Fifty-seventh Street. And I 
have a brother who lives in St. Paul." 

It is the way his voice thrills on "my America." 
I am sure any American correspondent hearing it 
would have been ready even in the fall of 1916 to 



36 WOMEN WANTED 

clasp hands across the sea in the Anglo-American 
compact to win this war. Gilbert Parker is in tune 
with the American temperament. He doesn't wear 
a monocle. And he says to a woman "Now, what 
can I do for you*?" in just the tone of voice that an 
American man would use when everything is going 
to be all right. I remember the red room just before 
he said it. Everything hung in the balance for me 
at this moment: "I have confidence in Mr. Vance, 
your editor. I know him," reflects the man who is 
deciding. "But — are you in 'Who's Who' 4 ?" Just 
for the lack of a line in a book, a government's good 
favour might have been lost ! But he reached for the 
copy above his desk. "Any more credentials'?" he 
asks. I cast desperately about in my mind — and 
drop a Phi Beta key in his hand. "I won't take 
that up on you," he says with a smile. And my 
cause is won. 

THE WAY IT IS DONE 

Long important envelopes lettered across the top 
"On His Majesty's Service" begin to arrive in my 
mail. All the government offices will be "at home" 
and helpful — when a personal interview has further 
convinced each that I am clearly not at all a German 
person nor the dangerous species of the suffragist. 
Where are the slippers that will match this gown*? 
And which are the beads that will be best 4 ? Mine is 
a hazardous undertaking, you see, that requires all of 
the art at the command of a woman : I must so state 
the mission on which I have come that my woman 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 37 

movement may seem pleasing in the eyes of a man — 
why, possibly a man whose country house even may 
have been burned in behalf of votes for women! 
Clearly I must mind my phrases, to get my permits. 
And if you're a journalist in war time, you need the 
permit as you do your daily bread. 

To get it, you write about it and call about it and 
write about it some more. And then it comes like 
this: 

Foreign Office, Nov. 6, 1917. 
Dear Mrs. Daggett: — 

If you will call to-morrow Wednesday at 3 o'clock at the 
main entrance to Woolwich Arsenal and ask for Miss 
Barker, presenting the attached paper, you will find that ar- 
rangements have been made for your visit. 

Yours very truly, 

G. S. B. 

Or it comes like this : 

Headquarters, London District, 
Horse Guards, S.W., Nov. 7, 1917. 
Mrs. M. P. Daggett, 

Room 464 Ritz Hotel, 
Dear Madam: — 

I have pleasure in informing you that under War Office 
instructions I have arranged with the officer commanding 3rd 
London General Hospital, Wandsworth Common, S.W,, for 
you to visit his hospital at 11 a. m. on Friday next, the 9th 
instant. 

I am, dear Madam 

Yours faithfully, 

O. 

Colonel D.A.D.M.S. 

London District. 



38 WOMEN WANTED 

England in war time is open for my inspection. 
I am getting my data nicely when one day there 
develops the dilemma of getting away with it. I 
open the Times one morning to read a new law: 
"On and after Dec. 1," the newspaper announces, 
"no one may be permitted to take out of England 
any photograph or printed or written material other 
than letters." I have a trunkful. Clearly I can't 
get by any khaki line with that concealed about my 
person. Sir Gilbert walks twice, three times up and 
down the red room. "I'll see what I can do about 
it," he says. "I don't know. But I'll try." A few 
days later my data begins to go right through all 
the laws. 

"First consignment," I cabled across the Atlantic, 
"coming on the St. Louts, if it doesn't strike a mine." 
I follow it with a registered letter to the editor: "I 
hope God and you will always be good to Gilbert 
Parker. And now if I don't get back — " And I 
give him exact directions about the material on the 
way. For it is no idle imagining that I may not 
reach home. 

I am facing France and the Channel crossing. 
Here in London it is so long since the Zeppelins 
have been heard from that, we are almost lulled into 
a sense of security that they will not come again. 
If they do high government circles usually hear in 
advance. A friend whose cousin's brother-in-law is 
in the Admiralty will let me know as soon as he finds 
out. But now all of these neatly arranged life and 
death plans must go into the discard. For you see 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 39 

I am changing my danger back again from Zeppelins 
to submarines. 

Let us see about the sinkings. Rumour reports 
now that about four out of six boats are getting 
across. I may get one of the four. On the night 
train from London, I wrap myself in my steamer rug 
in the unheated compartment. Travelling is not 
what you might say encouraged. This journey to 
Paris, accomplished ordinarily in four hours, will 
now take twenty-four. No two time-tables will any- 
where connect. There are as many difficulties as can 
possibly be arranged. Governments don't want you 
doing this every day in the week. And there is al- 
ways a question whether you will be permitted to do 
it at all. At Southampton I must meet the steel 
line with the challenge, "Who goes there?" 

Again I tell all my life to the man with a pistol at 
his belt and a sword at his side. He looks a second 
time at my passport: "You want to go all sorts of 
places you've no business to," he says sharply. 

"Not all of them now," I answer humbly, "only 
France." "Well, why even France?" he persists 
testily. I try to tell him. I present for a second 
consideration one of my "most important creden- 
tials." It is a personal letter from the French con- 
sul in New York specially and cordially recommend- 
ing me to the "care and protection of all the civil and 
military authorities in France." At last he tosses the 
letter inquiringly down his khaki line as much as to 
say, "Oh, well, if they want her over there?" It 
comes back with a nod of acquiescence from the last 



4 o WOMEN WANTED 

man, and a vise in purple ink lets me through to the 
boat. 

Shall I remember the Sussex? You don't so 
much after you've lived daily with death for a while. 
Some time during the night I am drowsily conscious 
that the boat begins to move. A skilled pilot has 
taken the wheel to guide us in and out among mines 
placed perilously as a protection against German 
submarines. Our lives are coming through danger- 
ous narrows. In the morning we are safe in Havre. 
The next steel line, here, is French. And with the 
letter from the consul at New York in my hand I 
am literally and cordially and politely bowed into 
France. 

At my hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, the American 
man opposite me at the dinner table the next day is 
just about to sail, "going back to God's country, as 
far away home as I can get, to the tall pine trees on 
the Pacific Coast," he tells me. He had come to 
Europe on an assignment that was to have been 
accomplished in three months. It has taken him a 
year to get to the front. My knife and fork drop 
in despair on my plate as he says it. "Cheer up," 
he urges. "You just have to remember to take a 
Frenchman's promises as lightly as they're made. 
They always aim to please. And your hopes rise so 
that you order two cocktails for dinner to-night. 
Then to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow there 
will be only more promises. But you're an Ameri- 
can woman. You'll dig through. Good luck," he 
says. And a taxicab takes him. 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 41 

WAR AS YOU FIRST SEE IT 

Here in Paris I stand in the boulevards as I stood 
in the Strand and Oxford Street, and watch the new 
woman movement going by] Every time a man drops 
dead in the trenches, a woman steps permanently 
into the niche he used to hold in industry, in com- 
merce, in the professions, in world affairs. ' It is the 
woman movement for which the ages have waited in 
ghastly truth. Rut, O God in Heaven, the price we 
pay! The price we pay! There is Madelaine La 
Fontaine, whom I saw yesterday in the Rue Ren- 
ouard. Her black dress outlined her figure against 
the yellow garden wall where she stood in a little 
doorway. She leaned and kissed her child on his 
way to school. As she lifted her head, I saw the 
grief in her eyes and the dead man's picture in the 
locket at her throat. 

They are everywhere through England and France, 
these women with the locket at their throats. Yet 
not for these would your heart ache most. There 
are the others, the clear-eyed girls in their 'teens just 
now coming up into long dresses. And life may not 
offer them so much as the pictured locket! There 
will be no man's face to fill it! Love that would 
have been, you see, lies slain there with all the bright 
boyhood that's falling on the battlefields. O God, 
the price we pay ! 

How far off now seems that summer's day I 
walked through 39th Street, my pulses throbbing 
pleasantly with the thrill of adventure and this 



42 WOMEN WANTED 

commission! I wonder if ever life can look like 
that again. The heavens arched all blue above New- 
York and the sunshine lay all golden on the city 
pavements. But that was before I knew. Oh, I 
had heard about war, even as have you and your next 
door neighbour. War was battle dates that had to 
be committed to memory at school. Or if instead of 
tiresome pages in history it should mobilise before 
our eyes, why, of course it would be flags flying, 
bands playing, and handsome heroes marching down 
Fifth Avenue ! 

And now I have seen war. Every way I turn I 
am looking on men with broken bodies and women 
with broken hearts. War is not merely the hell that 
may pass at Verdun or the Somme in the agony of a 
day or a night that ends in death. War is worse. 
War is that big strong fellow with eyes burned out 
when he "went over the top," whom I saw learning 
to walk by a strip of oilcloth laid on the floor of the 
Home for the Blind in London. They're teaching 
him now to make baskets for a living! War is that 
boy in his twenties without any legs whom I met in 
Regents Park in a wheel chair for the rest of his life ! 
War is that peasant from whom to-day I inquired my 
way in one of the little banlieues of Paris. There 
was the Croix de Guerre in his coat lapel. But he 
had to set down on the ground his basket of vege- 
tables to point down the Quai de Bercy with his 
remaining arm. You know how a Frenchman just 
has to gesture when he talks'? The stump of the 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 43 

other arm twitched a horrible accompaniment as he 
indicated my direction ! 

Those are brave men who are dying on all the 
battlefields lor their native lands. But oh, the brav- 
ery of these men who must live for their countries! 
These who have lost their eyes and their arms and 
their legs are as common over here as, why, as, say, 
men with brown hair. And these are terrible 
enough. But the men who have lost their faces! 
So long as they shall live, in every one's eyes into 
which they look, they must see a shudder of horror 
reflecting as in a looking glass their old agony. God 
in Heaven pity the men who have lost their faces ! 
The greatest sculptors in the world are busy to-day 
making faces to be fastened on. 

Like this you've got to go through Europe these 
days with a sob in the throat. I turn to the difficult 
details of living for relief from the awful drama of 
existence. In Paris there is the nicest United States 
ambassador that ever was sent in a black frock coat 
to represent his country abroad. In the course of 
my travels there are embassies I have met who are 
about as useful to the wayfaring American in a for- 
eign land as a Rogers plaster group on a parlour table. 
But you arrive at Mr. Sharpe's embassy in the Rue 
de Chaillot and it doesn't matter at all if it happens 
to be perhaps 4 133 and his reception hour closed at, 
say, 4:31. He says, "Come right in." Yes, he 
talks like that, not at all in the tone of royalty. 
"When'd you get in town?" he asks as genially as 



44 WOMEN WANTED 

if it might be Albany or Detroit instead of Paris. 
By this time you're sitting in a chair drawn up to his 
desk and discussing the last Democratic victory. 
4 'How's Charlie Murphy standing now with the 
administration'?" perhaps he asks, and then pretty 
soon, "But what can I do for you in Paris'?" 

And he does it. You don't have to call his sec- 
retary a week later to ask, How about that letter the 
embassy was going to give me? And the week after 
and the week after ring up some more to recall that 
there's an American running up an expense account 
at the hotel down the street. That's not Mr. 
Sharpe's way. Within ten minutes he had handed 
me a letter of introduction to M. Briand, Prime 
Minister of France. He laughed as he passed it to 
me. "Honestly, I'd hate to hand any one a gold 
brick," he said. "That document looks imposing 
enough and important enough that a limousine 
should be at your hotel entrance to take you to the 
front at 9 a. m. to-morrow. But nothing like that 
will happen. In France you have to remember that 
no one hurries. And an American can't." 

You can hear that in every foreign language. It 
was a spectacled Herr Professor in Berlin who once 
said to me severely, "You Americans, this hurry it is 
your national vice." I feel that foreign govern- 
ments have duly disciplined me in this direction dur- 
ing the past few months. So much of my job in 
serving the Pictorial Reviezv in Europe seems to be 
to sit on a chair and wait in a War Office ante room. 
At the Maison de la Presse, 3 Rue Francois 1st, in 



GLLMPSING THE WORLD WAR 45 

the Service de ITnformation Diplomatique, whither 
my Briand letter leads me, I seem to spend hours. 

They are going to be charmed, as Frenchmen can 
be, to take me to the front. And the days pass and 
the days pass. "Ah, but you see, for a lady journal- 
ist it is so different and so difficult. The trip must 
be specially arranged." And the weeks go by. And 
M. Polignac is so polite and polite and polite — just 
that and nothing more. 

One day he says to me: "And, Mme. Daggett, 
how long is it you will be in Paris'?" "Why," I 
falter, "I hadn't expected to winter here. I'm wait- 
ing, you know, just waiting until I can go to the 
front." "And how much longer now could you 
wait?" he inquires. "Oh," I answer desperately, 
"I'll surely have to go by the 29th. I couldn't stay 
longer than that." 

So in the course of the next few days there comes 
a letter telling me how it pains the French govern- 
ment that they should not be able to "take that trip 
in hand" before the 29th. And of course if I must 
leave them on that date, as I had said I must, oh, 
they so much regret, etc., etc. 

If I intend to get to the front, evidently then I 
must dig through! And in my room at the Hotel 
Regina in the Rue de Rivoli, I take my pen in hand. 

To "Maison de la Presse, Service de ^Information 
Diplomatique," I write: "Gentlemen, your favour 
of the 26th inst. with your regrets just received. 
And I hasten to write you that I cannot, for the sake 
of France, accept your decision as final, without pre- 



46 WOMEN WANTED 

senting to your attention a situation with which you 
may not be familiar. You see, gentlemen, in the 
country from which I come, we have a feminism that 
is neither an ideal nor a theory, but a working real- 
ity. In America, there were when I left, four mil- 
lion women citizens, and the State legislatures every 
little while making more. These are, gentlemen, 
four million citizens with a vote, whose wishes must 
be consulted by Congress at Washington in deter- 
mining the war policy of the United States. Their 
sympathies help to determine the amount of the war 
relief contributions that may come across the At- 
lantic. These are four million women who count, 
gentlemen, please understand, exactly the same as 
four million men. 

"Other American publications may offer Maison 
de la Presse other facilities for reaching the Amer- 
ican public. But none of them can duplicate the 
facilities presented by the Pictorial Review, the lead- 
ing magazine to champion the feminist cause. It is 
the magazine that is read by the woman who votes. 
Is not France interested in what she shall read 
there? 

"Believe me, gentlemen, the opportunity for 
propaganda that I offer you is unparalleled. I beg 
you therefore to reconsider. I earnestly desire to 
go to the front this week. Can you, I ask, permit 
me to leave this land without granting the privilege? 
For the sake of France, gentlemen ! Awaiting your 
reply, I remain," etc. 

That letter was posted at 1 1 o'clock at night. 



GLIMPSING THE WORLD WAR 47 

Before noon the next day Maison de la Presse was 
on the telephone and speaking English. In France 
they do not hurry. It is not customary to use the 
telephone. And it is at this time against the law to 
speak English on it. But listen: "Will Mme. 
Daggett find herself able to accept the invitation of 
the French government to go to the front on Thurs- 
day^" inquires the voice on the wire. 



CHAPTER II 

Close Up Behind the Lines 

"It is going to be perhaps a dangerous under- 
taking," says the French army officer the next day 
in the reception room at Maison de la Presse. He 
is speaking solemnly and impressively. "Do you 
still wish to go'?" he asks, addressing me in particu- 
lar. I look back steadily into his eyes. "Oui, Mon- 
sieur" Then his glance sweeps inquiringly the 
semicircle of faces. There are six journalists and 
a munitions manufacturer from Bridgeport, Con- 
necticut. And they all nod assent. The room is 
singularly silent for an instant, the officer just stand- 
ing quietly, his left hand resting on his sword-hilt. 
Then he turns and passes to each of us the official 
Permis de Correspondent de la Presse aux Armees, 
for our journey to Rheims the next day. And we 
all sign on the dotted line. 

Before I retire that night I rip the pink rose from 
off my hat and lay out the long dark coat which is 
to envelop me from my neck to my heels. It is the 
camouflage which, in accordance with the army 
orders, blends one with the landscape as a means of 
concealment from the German gunners' range. 
Rheims is under bombardment. It was fired on yes- 
terday. It may be to-morrow. There must not be, 

48 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 49 

the army officer has assured us, even the flower on 
the lady's hat for a target. 

My electric light winks once. Two minutes later 
it winks twice, and is gone, according to the martial 
law which puts out all lights in Paris from 1 1 130 
at night until 8 o'clock in the morning. I grope my 
way to bed in the darkness and at 6 o'clock the next 
morning, I dress by candle light. I count carefully 
the "pieces de identitie" in the chamois safety bag 
that hangs over my left hip and place in my hand 
bag my passport and my French permis, both of 
which must be presented at the railway station before 
I can purchase a ticket. I look to make sure that the 
inside pocket of my purse still contains my business 
card with its pencilled request: "In case of death 
or disaster kindly notify the Pictorial Review, New 
York City." And as I pass the porter's desk at the 
hotel entrance I leave with the sleepy concierge one 
other last message: "If Mme. Daggett has not re- 
turned by midnight, will the hotel management 
kindly communicate with her friend Mile. Marie 
Perrin, 12 Rue Ordener?" All these are precautions 
that you take lest you be lost in the great European 
war. 

The Gare l'Est is crowded always with throngs of 
soldiers arriving and departing for the front. It is 
necessary that our party assemble as early as seven 
o'clock to get in line at the ticket window for the 
eight o'clock train, for every traveller's credentials 
must be separately and carefully read and inspected. 
At Epernay, where we alight at 10:30, the station 



So WOMEN WANTED 

platform is densely packed with French soldiers in 
the sky blue uniforms that have been so carefully 
matched with the horizon color of France. A deb- 
onnair French captain has been appointed by the 
French government to receive us. He is in full 
uniform, splendid scarlet trousers and gold braided 
coat, with his left breast ornamented with the Croix 
de Guerre and the Medaille de Honneur. After the 
formal salutations are over, however, his orderly en- 
velops all of the captain's splendour too in the long 
sky blue coat for camouflage against the Germans. 
And we start for Rheims in the convoy of three lux- 
uriously appointed "camoens" the limousines placed 
at our disposal by the government. They, too, are 
painted blue grey to blend with the landscape, and 
each flies a little French flag. 

"Ou allez vous, Monsieur?" the sentry at the 
bridge of Epernay challenges our chauffeur. And 
the French captain himself leans from the window 
to answer, "A Rheims. line mission de la gouverne- 
mentr So we pass sentry after sentry. It is 15 
miles to Rheims. This is the Department of the 
Marne, with the vineyards that have produced the 
most famous wines of the world. The "smiling 
countryside of France," the poets have termed it. 
In September, 1914, history changed it to the grim 
field of carnage running red with the blood of civilis- 
ation that here made its stand against the onrushing 
Huns. Right across that valley see the battlefield 
of the Marne. Along this road the German army 
passed. From this little village that we are enter- 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 51 

ing, all the inhabitants fled before their approach. 
The enemy now is not far away. Over there, just 
against that horizon, lie the trenches they now oc- 
cupy. See this roadside along which we are driving, 
how it is curiously hung with linen curtains'? They 
are strung on wires fifteen feet high. For miles we 
ride behind them. It is the camouflage, the French 
captain says, that hides us from German view. We 
have just emerged from the forest at the edge of the 
Mountain of Rheims when, hark! Hear it — the 
sharp, distinct sound of an explosion! What is it? 
Where is it? The captain lays his hand reassur- 
ingly on my arm: "It is, I think, a tire that has 
burst on the rear car." 

"Captain," I say, "no automobile tire I ever heard 
sounded exactly like that." 

"You are not nervous?" he asks. I shake my 
head. "Well," he admits, "it is sometimes that the 
Germans do take a chance shot at this road." 

But at Rheims when we arrive, I notice that all 
our automobile tires are quite intact. We enter the 
city through the great bronze gate, the finishing orna- 
ments of which have been nicked off by German 
shells. We stand in the midst of a scene of desola- 
tion that looks like the ruins of some long ago civil- 
isation. Once, before this world that men had 
builded began to go to pieces, even as the blocks 
that children pile tumble to a nursery floor, here was 
a populous busy city of some 120,000 souls. Now 
our footsteps echo through deserted streets. Not a 
man or woman or child is in sight. The grass is 



52 WOMEN WANTED 

growing in the pavement there between the street- 
car tracks. The Hotel de Ville is only a shell of a 
building with the outer walls standing. This shop 
is shuttered tight. The next has the entire front 
gone, blown away in a bombardment. There are 
empty houses from which the occupants have months 
ago fled. Here stands the skeleton of a pretentious 
residence, the roof gone and the front riddled: we 
look directly in on the second-story room with a 
dresser and a bed in disarray. There a curtain from 
a deserted little front parlour flaps dismally through 
a shattered window-pane almost in our faces. Here 
above the cellar-grating of a house in ruins, there 
arises a sickening odour. We look at each other in 
questioning horror; perhaps the military with the 
pick and spade assigned to disinterment duty after 
some bombardment did not dig deep enough here. 
But the captain does not wish to understand and 
hurries us along to the next street. 

A CRUMBLING CIVILISATION 

In the ghastly stillness of this city that was once 
Rheims, at last there is a sound of life. Down the 
Rue de la Paix, the street of peace, an army supply- 
wagon clatters past us. And you have no idea how 
pleasant can be the sound even of noise. 

Then across the way appears a mi Ik- woman, push- 
ing her cart with four tin cans and jingling a little 
bell. There are a few people, it seems, still left, 
employes in the champagne industry, who cling to 
their homes even though they must live in the cellar. 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 53 

Now the devastation increases and the houses begin 
to be mere rubbish heaps of brick and mortar as we 
approach the Place de la Cathedrale. 

At length we stand before the famous Cathedral 
of Rheims itself. I know of no more impressive 
place to be in the closing days of the year 1916 than 
here at the front of the terrible world war. 

In this edifice is symbolised all that civilisation of 
ours that culminated in the Twentieth Century, now 
to be razed to the ground. For lo, these seven hun- 
dred years, even as the two great towers above us 
have lifted the infinite beauty of their architectural 
lace-work against the blue-domed sky, some thirty 
generations of the human soul have sent their aspi- 
rations heavenward on the incense of prayer. Over 
these very stones beneath our feet, king after king 
of France has walked, to receive the crown of Charle- 
magne and to be anointed before this altar from "le 
sainte ampouli." And now here to-day is history in 
no dead and musty pages but in the making, white- 
hot from the anvil of the hour! Only a little over 
a mile away are the German guns that from day to 
day shower the shell-fire of their destruction on the 
city. This spot upon which we stand is their par- 
ticular objective point of attack. Hear! There is 
a rumbling detonation. We wait hushed for an 
instant. But the sound is not repeated. You see, 
already there have been some 30,000 shells poured 
on Rheims. Twelve hundred fell in one day only. 
At any moment there may be more. 

"If the bombardment should begin," we had been 



54 WOMEN WANTED 

instructed at Maison de la Presse, "you would rush 
for the nearest cellar." I think we all have listen- 
ing ears. Every little while there is certainly re- 
peated that desultory firing on the front. 

But nothing is dropping on us. And reassured, 
we turn to examine the great shell hole in the pave- 
ment not five yards distant. The Archbishop's Pal- 
ace, immediately adjoining the church, is flat on the 
ground in ruins. The cathedral itself is slowly 
being wrecked. But in the public square directly 
before it, look here ! See Joan of Arc on her horse 
triumphantly facing the future! In her hand she 
is waving the bright flag of France. Amid the debris 
of the great war piling up about her, the famous 
statue stands absolutely untouched. Here at the 
very storm centre of the attack on civilisation, with 
the hell-fire of the enemy falling in a rain of thou- 
sands of shells about her, she seems as secure, as safe 
under God's heaven as when the people passed daily 
before her to prayer. Shall we not call it a miracle? 

"See," says the captain, his head reverently un- 
covered, his eyes shining, "our Maid of Orleans. 
No German shall ever harm her!" And since the 
war began, it is true, no German ever has. Not a 
statue of the famous girl-warrior anywhere in 
France has been so much as scratched by the enemy. 
Her name was the password on the day of the Battle 
of the Marne and there are those who think it was 
the shadowy figure of a girl on a horse that led the 
troops to that victory. Oh, though cathedrals may 
crumble and cities be laid waste and fields be devas- 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 55 

tated, some time again it shall be well with the 
world. For the faith of the people of France in 
Joan of Arc shall never pass away. 

That we realize, as we look on the rapt face of 
the captain who leads us now within the great church 
itself, where for three years all prayers have ceased. 
The marvellous stained glass from the thirteenth 
century, which made the religious light of the beau- 
tiful windows, now hangs literally 'in tatters like 
torn bed-quilts blowing in the wind. That great 
jagged hole in the roof was torn by a shell at the last 
bombardment. There are fissures in the side walls. 
The rain comes in, and the birds. Doves light there 
on the transept rail. Amid the rubbish of broken 
saints with which the floor is littered, there yet stands 
here and there a sorrowful statue hung with the gar- 
land of faded flowers reminiscent of some far-off fete 
day. And Requiescat in pace, you may read the 
legend cut in the stone of the eastern wall above the 
tomb of some Christian Father. 

In the nearby Rue du Cardinal de Lorraine, in a 
garden saying his rosary, walks an old man in a red 
cap, one of the few remaining residents who will not 
leave the city. He is the venerable Mgr. Lucon, 
Cardinal of Rheims. Always he is praying, praying 
to God to spare the cathedral. And God does not. 
"I do not understand. I suppose that He in His 
wisdom must have some purpose in permitting the 
church to be destroyed,'' says the Cardinal of Rheims. 
"I do not understand," he always adds humbly. 

"One may not understand," repeats the captain. 



56 WOMEN WANTED 

And he takes us to luncheon at the Lion d'Or, the 
little inn where the wife of the proprietor still stays 
to serve any "mission of the French gouvernement" 
Then he shows us the famous champagne cellars of 
the Etablissement Pommeryi Here one hundred 
feet below the ground, in the chalk caves built a 
thousand years ago by the Romans, are twelve miles 
of subterranean passageways with thirteen million 
bottles of the most celebrated champagne in the 
making. 

The superintendent pours out his choicest brand: 
"Vive la France and the Allies," he says, lifting his 
glass. He talks more English than the captain can. 
He is telling us of when the Germans entered 
Rheims. "Four officers," he says, "came riding 
ahead of the army. And I met them by chance just 
as they arrived in the market place of Rheims." 

"What did you do?" asks the New York corre- 
spondent of the London Daily Mail. "I wept," says 
the Frenchman, simply and impressively. "Gentle- 
men," he adds solemnly and sadly, "I hope you may 
never meet some day four conquering Chinamen rid- 
ing up Broadway." 

I find myself catching my breath suddenly at that. 
And I am glad when the captain hums a gay little 
French tune and holds out his glass a second time: 
"Give us again 'Vive la ¥ ranee' " 

The sun is dipping red in the west when we turn 
to leave Rheims and Joan of Arc bravely flying the 
French flag before its crumbling cathedral. There 
is the rumble of guns once more at the front. Then 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 57 

the winter dusk rapidly envelops the road along 
which we are speeding. It is the same road to Eper- 
nay. But now it is alive with traffic. Under the 
protecting cover of the soft darkness, all sorts of 
vehicles are passing. The headlights of our car flash 
on a continuous procession of motor-lorries, muni- 
tion-wagons, army supply-wagons, tractors, and peas- 
ants' carts carrying produce to market. So we arrive 
at Epernay for a lunch of red wine and war bread 
at the little station. By ten o'clock we are safely 
within the walls of Paris. We have escaped bom- 
bardment ! 

It is two days later before the French official com- 
munique in the daily papers begins again recording: 
"At Rheims toward six o'clock last night, after a 
violent attack with trench mortars, the Germans 
twice stormed our advance posts. But these two 
attempts completely failed under our machine-gun 
fire and grenade bombing." 

DIFFICULT DAYS IN THE WAR ZONE 

It isn't what happens necessarily. It's what's 
always-going-to-happen that keeps one guessing be- 
tween life and death in a war zone. And there are 
special torments of the inquisition devised for jour- 
nalists. Ordinary civilians are occupied only with 
saving their lives. Journalists must save their notes. 

At half-past eleven o'clock that night of my return 
from Rheims, there is dropped in the mail box on 
my hotel room door, a cablegram from America: 
"Steamship St. Louis here. Your material from 



58 WOMEN WANTED 

London not on it." The room in which I stand, the 
Hotel Regina, and the city of Paris all reel unstead- 
ily for an instant. Has the British Government 
eaten up all my journalistic findings so preciously 
entrusted to Wellington Housed I grasp the brass 
foot rail of the bed and bring myself upstanding. 
If they have, it is no time for me to lose my head. 

Jacques with the empty coat sleeve and the Croix 
de Guerre on his breast, who operates the elevator, I 
am sure thinks it a woman demented who is going 
out in the streets of Paris alone at midnight. But 
' 'an Americaine" one can never tell what "an Amer- 
icaine" will do. "Pardon," he says hesitatingly as 
I step out, '"madame knows the hour?" Yes, ma- 
dame knows the hour. But an alien may not send 
a telegram without presenting a passport, the docu- 
ment that never for an instant goes out of one's per- 
sonal possession. No messenger can do this errand 
for me. 

Five minutes later I am in a taxicab tearing down 
the Rue Ouatre Septembre to the cable office in the 
Bourse. My appeal for help to Sir Gilbert Parker 
in London is being counted on the blue telegraph 
blank by the operator at the little window, when sud- 
denly I remember I have forgotten. My hand feels 
helplessly over my left hip where there is concealed 
a letter of credit for three thousand dollars. But I 
falter, "I haven't any money, that is, where I can 
get at it." 

"I have," speaks a voice over my shoulder. I look 
around into a man's cheerful countenance. "What's 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 59 

the damage ?" he says again in pleasant Manhattan 
English. I hesitate only for an instant. "It's six- 
teen francs I need." 

He promptly pulls out his bank-roll. I ask for 
his card, of course, to return the loan the next day 
with many thanks for his courtesy. He, however, 
has no security that I will. As he puts me in my 
taxicab and lifts his hat beneath the faint war- 
dimmed light of the street lamps in the dark Rue 
Vivienne, he only knows that I am his country- 
woman. And he is an American man. The Lord 
seems to send them when you need them most. 

Three days later the awful silence in which I am 
suffering all the fears there are for a journalist in 
war-time, is broken by a reply from London: "Ma- 
terial only delayed. Sailed steamship New York 
instead of St. Louis." After another two weeks of 
fitful nights in which I dream of men in khaki who 
confiscate journalistic data, there comes the message 
from New York that is like hearing from Heaven: 
"Your consignment of material safely arrived." 
Meanwhile, before I may be permitted to take a line 
out of this country, Maison de la Presse must pass 
on my French data. I am feverishly editing it for 
their approval when there is a knock at my door. 
The maid is there with more letters than the little 
brass mail-box will hold. I eagerly open my Amer- 
ican mail to find it filled with holiday greetings. So, 
it can still be Christmas somewhere in the world! 
I am standing at the window with a Christmas card 
in my hand, thinking pleasant thoughts of the far- 



60 WOMEN WANTED 

away city called New York where there is still peace 
on earth, good- will to men, when down the Rue de 
Rivoli passes a motor-lorry piled high with black 
crosses. There are fields in France that are 
planted with black crosses, acres and acres of them. 
After each new push on the front, more are required, 
black crosses by the cartload ! I glanced at my cal- 
endar. Why, to-day is Christmas ! I had quite for- 
gotten. You see, over here all joy-making occasions 
seem to have been such a long while ago, like the 
stories of once upon a time. 

I turn once more to the task of making ready my 
data for Maison de la Presse. Here a too colourful 
sentence must be rejected. There is a too flagrantly 
feministic document that will be safest in the waste 
basket. It is the martial mind that I must meet. A 
press bureau, you see, is prepared to pass promptly 
propaganda on the battles of the Somme. But dare 
one risk, say, a pamphlet on the breast feeding of 
infants? Propaganda about the rising value of a 
baby ! Dear, dear, it might, for all a man could tell, 
be treason, seditious material calculated to give aid 
and comfort to the enemy ! Already to my inquiries 
about maternity measures in Paris, have I not been 
answered suspiciously: "But why do you ask? 
This matter it is not of the war." 

My emasculated data at last are ready for review 
by le chef du service de la presse. He stamps it all 
over with his signature in red ink. It is done up in 
packages and officially sealed in red wax with the 
seal of the state of France. At the Post Office in 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 61 

the Rue Etienne Marcel, I register it and mail it, 
committing it with a sigh to the mercies of the great 
Atlantic. 

DEALING WITH GOVERNMENT 

Having crossed the Channel once alive, it seems 
like tempting fate to try it again. I draw in my 
breath as one about to plunge into a cold bath in 
the morning, and go out to secure from three govern- 
ments the necessary permission that will allow me 
to return to England. From the police alone it 
sometimes takes eight days to secure this concession. 
But at the Prefecture of Police, they read my letter 
of introduction from the French consul in New York. 
And I have only to leave my photograph and sign 
on the dotted line. In five minutes they have given 
my passport the necessary vise. The American con- 
sul easily enough adds his. All my journey appar- 
ently is going as pleasantly as a summer holiday 
planned by a Cook's Agency, when at length I come 
up with a bump against the British Control office in 
the Rue Cheveaux Lagarde. And the going away 
from here requires some negotiations. The British 
lieutenant 111 charge reads my nice French letter and 
without comment tosses it aside. "You wish to go 
to London?" he asks in great surprise. "Now, why 
should you wish to go to London?" He gives me 
distinctly to understand this is not the open season 
for tourists in England. "We don't care to have 
people travelling," he says in a tone of voice as if 
that settles it. "Why have you come over here in 



62 WOMEN WANTED 

these difficult and dangerous times, anyhow 4 ?" he 
asks querulously and a trifle suspiciously. "The 
best thing you can do is to go home directly. And 
America is right across the water from here." 

"But, Lieutenant," I gasp, "my trunk is in Eng- 
land and I've got to have a few clothes." 

"No," he says, "personal reasons like that don't 
interest the British Government. Neither am I able 
to understand a journalistic mission which should 
take a woman travelling in these days of war." He 
looks at me. "The New Position of Women! It 
is not of sufficient interest to the British Government 
that I should let you go," he says with finality. 

"I know, Lieutenant," I agree. "But surely you 
are interested in the Allies' war propaganda for the 
United States'?" The light from the window shines 
full on his face and I can see a faint relaxation about 
the lines of his mouth. "Now I wish to go to Eng- 
land so that I may tell the story of the British wom- 
en's war work. The readers of Pictorial Review are 
four million women who vote." The lieutenant 
stirs visibly. His sword rattles against the rounds 
of his chair. 

Well, my request hangs in the balance like this 
for a week. At length one day he says, "I'm think- 
ing about letting you go. I shall have to consult 
with my superior officer. I don't at all know that he 
will consent." 

There is the day that I have almost given up hope. 
I am waiting again before the lieutenant's desk. He 
has gone for a last consultation with the superior 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 63 

officer. Will he never come back 4 ? I stare at his 
empty chair. The clock on the mantel ticks and 
ticks. The fire in the grate snaps and snaps. Other 
people at the next desk who get easier vises than 
mine, come and go — a Red Cross nurse, two French 
sisters of charity, a little French boy returning to 
school. I have counted the pens in the lieutenant's 
glass tray. I know every blot on his desk-pad. The 
clock has ticked thirty-five minutes of suspense for 
me before the little French soldier in red trousers 
opens the door and the lieutenant is here. 

"Well," he says, "we have decided. You are to 
be permitted to go, but on one condition." And he 
vises my passport, "No return to France during the 
period of the war." 

It has taken nearly two weeks to win my case. 
Two days later at 6 a. m., when the gardens of the 
Tuileries are outlined dimly against the faint rays of 
dawn, my taxicab is reeling through the streets of 
Paris to the Gare St. Lazare. It is noon before the 
train reaches Havre. The Red Cross nurse, the Lon- 
don newspaper correspondent and the Belgian air- 
man all file out of our compartment and the Irish 
major from Salonica is last. He turns to me with 
a frank Irish smile: "Your bag can just as well go 
along with my military luggage. And they'll never 
even open it." 

At eight o'clock that night in Havre, my passport 
and the letter from the French consul in New York 
are handed down the steel line of ten men at a table. 
Each looks up with the same curious smile when his 



64 WOMEN WANTED 

glance arrives at the last vise: "Who put that on 
your passport?" asks the officer at the head of the 
line. "The British Control Office?" he says with 
heat. "It's none of their business." In an inner 
room, four more men examine my documents. "Did 
the British officer see this letter from the French 
consul?" I am asked. I nod assent. A laugh goes 
round the room. "Pardon, madame," says the man 
with the most gold braid, "the British Control Office 
does not control France. You are welcome to 
France, madame, welcome to France any time you 
choose to come." 

That is the War Office that speaks. So, with the 
French Government's cordial invitation ringing 
pleasantly in my ears, I go on board the Channel 
boat. But I have no intention of returning to 
France right away, gentlemen. I lay out my life- 
preserver with a feeling of great relief that if I sur- 
vive this crossing, it will not have to be done over 
again. And once more the boat in the darkness 
steals safely and silently across the Channel. 

In the morning, in Southampton, the major from 
Salonica hands me his card: "Letters," he says, a 
trifle wistfully, "will always reach me at that ad- 
dress." I look at the card here before me on my 
desk as I write and I wonder. The major with his 
Irish smile may now be lying dead on the held of 
battle somewhere on the front. In the midst of life 
we are in death almost anywhere in the world to-day. 






o' 3 W , 
O p- 3 H 



* 




CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 65 



IN COLDEST ENGLAND 

I have again "established my residence" with the 
police in London. I feel on terms of the most inti- 
mate acquaintance with the London police. So 
many of them have my photograph and are convers- 
ant with all the biographical and genealogical details 
of my life. You have to do it, register at a police 
station, every time you change your hotel. I have 
moved so often, I am nervous lest I seem like a 
German spy. But at the Bow Street Station, the 
officer in charge just nods genially: "Oh, that's 
quite all right. Looking for more heat, aren't you"? 
I know. You Americans are all alike." 

Have you ever shivered in London in January^ 
Then you don't know what it is to be cold, not even 
when the thermometer drops to zero and New York's 
all snowed in but the subway, and the street cleaning 
department has to spend a million dollars to dig you 
out of the drifts. Yes, I know about the Gulf 
Stream. It does pleasantly moderate the outdoor 
climate so that it is never really winter in England. 
But the Gulf Stream does not get into their houses. 
I was a luncheon guest the other day at a residence 
with a crest on its note-paper. The hostess put on 
a wrap to pass down the staircase from the drawing- 
room to the dining-room, and with my bronchitis — 
all Americans get it in London — I was simply unable 
to remove my coat at all. This mansion, English 
ivy-covered, and mildewed with ages of aristocracy, 
has never had a real fire within its walls. There are 



66 WOMEN WANTED 

only the tiny grate fires which are, as it were, mere 
ornaments beneath the mantelpiece. The drawing- 
room fire is lighted only just before the guests arrive : 
the men with lifted coat-tails back up to it, their 
hands crossed behind them spread to the blaze; the 
dog and the cat draw near to the fender; conversa- 
tion about the fire becomes general in the tone of 
voice, well, in which one might admire a rare sunset. 
The dining-room fire, likewise, is lighted only just 
before the butler announces luncheon. And in all 
this grand mansion you discover there isn't any place 
to be warm, unless perchance the cook in the kitchen 
may have it. 

Well, English hotels strive to be as coldly correct 
as this English high life. And I have suffered cold 
storage in Piccadilly at the rate of ten dollars a day 
as long as my bronchitis will bear it. I ought to be 
ill in bed at this moment. But I can't be. There 
isn't a hospital bed in Europe without a wounded 
soldier in it. Schools, orphanages, monasteries, 
country residences, castles and many hotels have 
been turned into hospitals, all of them full of sol- 
diers. A civilian who may be ill literally has not 
where to lay his head. So I set out desperately to 
find heat in London. I think I have searched every 
hotel from Mayfair to Bloomsbury Square. As a 
special concession to American patronage a few of 
them have put steam-heat on their letter-heads, "cen- 
tral heat," they call it. But all European radiators, 
when there are any, are as reluctant as their elevators. 
"Lifts" move under groaning protest and if they go 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 67 

up, they let you know they do not expect to come 
down. The radiators are equally as sullen about 
radiating. They don't want to at all. English 
radiators are such toy affairs as to be incapable of 
any real action. They are so small they get lost 
behind the furniture. At the Hyde Park Hotel, 
the clerk and I hunted all over the place : "I'm sure 
we used to have them," he said. At last our search 
was rewarded. We found the one that was to keep 
me warm. It was behind the dresser and such a 
miniature affair, you'd surely have guessed Santa 
Claus must have left it for the children at Christ- 
mas time. 

Some one advised me that English hotels really 
didn't do steam heat well and the best way to be 
warm was to go to Brown's, which is famous for its 
grate fires. The Queen of Holland and the English 
nobility always stop at Brown's. So I tried 
Brown's. I bought all the "coals" the management 
would sell at one time and tipped the maid liber- 
ally to start the fire in my room. To maintain the 
temperature anything above fifty, I had to sit by 
the grate and keep putting on the coals myself. In 
the bathroom there was no heat at all. "Oh, yes, 
there was," the management argued; "didn't the hot 
water pipe for the bath come right up through the 
floor *?" No, they insisted, there couldn't be any fire 
in the grate in the bathroom — because there never 
had been since Brown's began. Why, probably the 
hotel would burn up with so much heat as that. 

So I moved on and on. At last I came in the 



68 WOMEN WANTED 

Strand to the Savoy, where all Americans eventually 
arrive. It is the only hotel in England with real 
steam-heat. Just pull out your dresser and your 
wash-stand. Concealed behind each you will dis- 
cover a radiator, warm, real, life-size ! Eureka ! It 
is the only modern-comfort temperature in London. 
I am able to remove sundry clothing accessories of 
Shetland wool accumulated at Selfridge's Depart- 
ment Store in Oxford Street. And for the first time 
since my arrival on these shores I am sitting in my 
hotel room unwrapped in either a rose satin down 
bed-quilt or a steamer-rug. My soul once more un- 
curls itself for work. It is wonderful to be warm 
to-day, even if one must be drowned by the Germans 
to-morrow. 

GREATEST DRAMA IN HISTORY 

It begins to look gravely as if one may be. Out 
there in the yellow fog beyond my window, more and 
more ominous are the posters that come hourly drift- 
ing down the Strand from Fleet Street. Germany 
has announced to the world that she is going to do 
her worst. And she begins to tune her submarines 
for the sink-on-sight frightfulness more terrible than 
any that has preceded. The Dutch boats stop. 
The Scandinavian boats stop. The American boats 
stop. The entire ocean is now blanketed in one 
danger zone. 

All the world's a stage of swift-moving events, 
the greatest and most terrible spectacle that has ever 
been put on since civilisation began. And we in 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 69 

London are spectators before a drop-curtain tight 
buttoned down at the corners ! It is lifted now and 
then by the hand of the censor to reveal only what 
the Government decides is good for the people to 
see. The plain citizen in London has no means of 
knowing how much it is that he does not know. It 
was six months after the Battle of Ypres had oc- 
curred before the English newspapers got around to 
mention the event. So you see with what a baffling 
sense of futility it is that one scans the newspapers 
here now while history is making so fast that a new 
page is turned every day. I am hungry for a real 
live paper, bright yellow from along Park Row. 
And over my breakfast coffee at the Savoy I have 
onlv the London Times, gravely discussing by the 
column, "What Is Religion?" and 'The Value of 
Tudor Music," while the rest of the world is breath- 
less before a Russian revolution, later to be given out 
in London exactly a week old. 

But there is news that even the censor is playing 
up with a lavish hand. The Strand streams with 
the posters: "The United States on the Verge of 
War." My official permit from Downing Street to 
go to Holland has arrived in the morning's mail. I 
cannot get there. I cannot get to Scandinavia. 
Can I get home? It is the question that is agitating 
a number of Americans abroad. We watchfully 
wait for a warship to convoy us. But scan the At- 
lantic as we may from day to day, there is none 
arriving. The folks back home have a way of for- 
getting that we are here. Those that do remember 



7 o WOMEN WANTED 

are saying it serves us right. We had no business 
to come in war-time. Sixteen Americans at the 
Savoy every day rush to read the news bulletins that 
hourly are tacked up in the lounge. But the wheels 
of government at Washington move so slowly. The 
Senate only debates and debates. And there is noth- 
ing said about us! Will it be possible to flag the 
attention of Congress? The same idea occurs simul- 
taneously to Senator Hale in Paris and to several of 
us in London. This is the answer to my cabled 
inquiry to Washington: "Your request the fifth. 
Impracticable send warship convoy American liner 
bringing Americans back from Europe. Signed, 
Robert Lansing, Secretary of State." 

So, that's settled. The only way for any of us to 
get away from here will be just — to go. And I 
begin to. There is myself to get home, and my 
data. Three consignments have already gone over 
under special government auspices. But there have 
been anxious periods of waiting before a cable, "Stuff 
safe," has reached me. I am going to sink or swim 
with the remainder of it. Wellington House ar- 
ranges with the censor at Strand House. There the 
material is read and done up in packages, in each of 
which is enclosed a letter with the War Office Stamp : 
"Senior Aliens Officer. Port of Embarkation. 
Please allow the package in which this is enclosed 
to accompany bearer Mrs. M. P. Daggett as personal 
luggage. This package has been examined by the 
censorship." All these data are now packed in a 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 71 

suitcase that stands in my hotel room awaiting my 
departure. 

When I was caught in the homeward rush of 
Americans from London in 1914, the steamship of- 
fices in Cockspur Street were jammed to the doors. 
To-day they are silent, empty, echoing places. In 
1917 it is such a life and death matter to travel, that 
most people don't. So grave is the danger that the 
Government refuses to permit passports at all for 
English women. But for me, this that I am facing 
is the risk of my trade in war-time. 

To-day I had a letter from my New York office: 

"The best thing for you to do is to get home as 
quick as you can. Wouldn't it be safest by way of 
Spain? Any way of course is taking a chance and 
a big one. I wish to the Lord you were here, safe 
and sound. But there isn't a darn thing any of us 
can do about getting you back. You have either 
got to take your life in your hands and take a chance 
coming back, or stay in London. And God knows 
when this war is going to end now !" 

It is "safest by way of Spain." Ambassador 
Gerard getting home from Germany selected that 
route. But my passport, I remember, is black- 
marked, "No return to France." And I shall have 
the British Foreign Office to explain to before I can 
reach my French friends who so cordially invited my 
return. There will be altogether some four steel 
lines to pass that way. I'd rather face the subma- 
rines. The Spanish boats are small, only about 



72 WOMEN WANTED 

4,000 tans, which would be like crossing the Atlantic 
in a bathtub. I'd rather be drowned than seasick. 
I think I shall make sure of comfort by a British 
boat. 

And then — the posters in the Strand begin to an- 
nounce, "Seven ships sunk to-day." Four Dutch 
boats trying for their home port, are submarined in 
English waters. The Laconia goes down. The 
Anchor liner California meets her fate. It's real, I 
tell you, on this side where they're daily bringing in 
the survivors. About nine hours in the open boats 
is the usual experience for the rescued. Do you see 
the deterring, dampening effect that this might have 
on one's enthusiasm for departure? 

FACING LIFE OR DEATH*? 

This is the month of March. Oh, wouldn't it be 
well to wait until the water is warmer? It's a dis- 
quieting sensation to wake up in the night and medi- 
tate on whether, say, a week or ten days from now, 
you may find yourself at the bottom of the Atlantic. 
In this state of low depression, you decide to live a 
little longer. And so to-morrow you select a little 
later date for your sailing. Then the arrival of 
American mail proves that at least one more boat has 
run the blockade and escaped the submarines. 
Yours might. 

So I take my courage in both hands, and my pass- 
port, too, and buy my ticket. When I have done 
this, a nice, quiet calm possesses me. It is as if I had 
been a long time dying. Now it is over and fin- 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 73 

ished. I have nothing more to do about it. I pack 
my trunk just curiously wondering, shall I ever wear 
this gown again*? Or shall I not"? Oh, well, it is 
such a relief to be going away from all this Old 
World grief. Are the war clouds gathering over 
New York, too? But I still can see the city all 
golden in the sunlight beneath the clear blue sky. 

Last night I was awakened at twelve o'clock by 
the sounds of a gay supper party's revelry in some 
room down my corridor. Which of the staid Amer- 
ican gentlemen at this hotel is celebrating? Listen. 
They are singing, evidently with lifted glasses: 
"Hail, hail, the gang's all here." Not to the na- 
tional anthem, could my heart thrill more than to 
Tammany's own classic refrain. New York ! New 
York! Not all the Kaiser's submarines can stop 
me from starting. 

I may not send word of the steamship or the date 
of my departure. But I cable my home office : "If 
I do not succeed in reporting to you myself, apply for 
the latest information of my movements, to the In- 
ternational Franchise Club, 9 Grafton Street, Lon- 
don." You see, if I should get the last Long Assign- 
ment. . . . 

There are only sixteen first-class passengers for 
this trip on the Carmania in her grim grey war- 
paint. Two of us are women, at whom the rest 
stare with curious interest. Each of us as we step 
aboard is handed a lifeboat ticket. Mine reads: 
"R. M. S. Carmania. Name, Mrs. M. P. Daggett, 
Boat No. 5." 



74 WOMEN WANTED 

I think I know now how a person feels who is 
going to his execution. We who walk up this steam- 
ship gangway are under sentence of death by the 
German Government. The old Latin proverb 
flashes into my mind: "Morituri te salutamus." 
It is we who may be about to die who salute each 
other here on the Carmania and then we are facing 
the steel line. Four British officers with swords at 
their sides and pistols in their belts wait for us in 
the drawing-room. All the other passengers go 
easily by but the New York Jewish gentleman with 
the German name. At last he, too, clears. But the 
British Government is not yet finished with a jour- 
nalist. The Tower of London and its damp dark 
dungeons is again materialising clearly for me. 

The lieutenant has been questioning me for half- 
an-hour. "I'm sorry," he says, "but I think I shall 
have to have you searched. This suitcase of jour- 
nalistic data, you say that there is inside each pack- 
age a note stating that the material has been passed 
by the Government? Why isn't that note on the 
outside of the package*?" 

"I don't know," I answer earnestly. "It's the 
question I asked in vain at Strand House. The 
censor said that it had to be this way. I assure 
you the note is there. But if you break the outside 
seal to find out, my government guarantee is gone. 
And if this boat by any chance goes to Halifax, how 
are they to know there that I'm not a German spy?" 

The' lieutenant's eyes are on my face. I think 
he believes I am telling the truth. "Well," he or- 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 75 

ders his corporal, "go to her stateroom with her and 
have a look at her luggage." The corporal is very 
nice. He finds a blank note book in my trunk. 
"You aren't supposed to have this," he says. And 
there is a package of business correspondence. "Did 
you tell him out there about these letters'? Well, 
you needn't. And I won't." At the suitcase with 
the magic seals he gives only one glance. To his 
superior officer, when we return, the corporal re- 
ports: "Everything's quite all right. Stuff's 
stamped all over with the seal of the War Office." 

The lieutenant looks at his watch. "I had break- 
fast at seven. It's now one o'clock. That's lunch 
time." 

"Don't, let me detain you," I suggest pleasantly. 
He shakes his head. "I've got to put this job 
through." 

I am this job. But the lieutenant has smiled. 
The conversation eases up. "Pretty good suffrage 
data down at the Houses of Parliament," he himself 
suggests. "Do you know, I'm almost willing now 
that women should vote. I didn't used to be. But 
the war has changed my mind. 

"By the way," he asked suddenly, "you're not 
mixed up with any of those militants, are you 4 ?" I 
explain that I am not a suffragette, just a plain 
suffragist. "Because I think those militants ought 
to be shot," he adds. I can only bite my tongue. 
Has the lieutenant no sense of humour? No mili- 
tant in Holloway Jail was ever more militant than 
he is with his sword and pistol at this moment. 



76 WOMEN WANTED 

"There's a question I'd like to ask," he goes on. 
"In your country where women have the franchise, 
do you find that they all vote alike*?" "No more 
than all the men," I answer. "Then that's all 
right," he says in a relieved tone. "I've been afraid 
that if we let women vote, they might all vote against 



SHALL WE GO DOWN OR ACROSS*? 

"You really aren't a militant, are you 6 ?" he says 
again, thoughtfully. "Well, I'll let you go." So 
that's my last steel line. 

The boat begins to move in the Mersey. And 
the ship's siren sounds shrilly. It is the summons 
to shipwreck drill. We assemble quickly in the 
lounge on the top deck, every one wearing a life- 
preserver. At a second call of the siren, we file out 
following the captain's lead, to stand by our boats 
in which the crew are already clambering to their 
oars. 

So now we know how for the moment of dis- 
aster. The whole steamship waits for it. This 
is a weird voyage that we begin. Mine-sweep- 
ers out there ahead of us are cleaning up the seas. A 
Scandinavian boat has just been sowing mines all 
over the water. The Baltic, here beside us, poked 
her nose out yesterday, scented danger and returned 
to the river. We wait now in the Mersey twenty- 
four hours before the mysterious signal is given that 
it is the propitious moment for our boat to get 
away. We steal softly to sea under cover of a 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 77 

dense fog and a white snow-storm. The sea-gulls 
are screaming shrilly above us like birds of prey. 
And we who look into each other's eyes are facing 
we know not whither, it may be America or the 
Farthest Country of all. 

Three men pace the wind-swept captain's bridge, 
scanning the horizon, and there are always two cling- 
ing in the crow's nest in the icy gale. This boat is 
manned by a pedigreed crew. From the captain to 
the last cabin-boy, everybody has been torpedoed 
at least once. The Marconi operator never smiles. 
He sits at his instrument with a grey, drawn look 
about his young boyish mouth. He was on the Lusi- 
tania when she went down. He was the last man 
off the Laconia the other day. The wrinkled suit 
he's wearing is the one they picked him up in out of 
the sea. 

For two days out, we have the little destroyers 
with us, and then we are left to our luck and the 
gun in front and the watching men aloft. The life- 
boats are always swung out on their davits for the 
siren's sudden call. The doors of the upper deck 
stand open, waiting beside each a preparedness ex- 
hibit, boxes of biscuit, flasks of brandy, and a pile 
of blankets we are to seize as we run. We two 
women have filled the pockets of our steamer-coats 
with safety-pins, hairpins and a comb, first aid that 
no one remembers to bring when they pick you up 
from the open boat. My fellow traveller is hud- 
dling very close to her six-foot husband, to be tucked 
safely under his arm at the emergency moment. It 



78 WOMEN WANTED 

is good that we are having rough weather. When 
the waves are tossing high, the periscopes may not 
find us. 

We are sixteen people who wander like disembod- 
ied spirits from the gay days of old through these 
great empty rooms that once rang with the joy of 
hundreds of tourists on their pleasure-jaunts over 
the world. There are no games. There is no dan- 
cing. There is no band. There are no steamer- 
chairs on deck. At sundown we are closed in tight 
behind iron shutters. No one may so much as light 
a cigaret outside. 

In the ghastly silence of the days that pass, there 
is only the strain and quiver of the ship, and the 
solemn boom, boom of the sea. Death is so near 
that it seems fitting the glad activities of life should 
cease, as when a corpse is laid out in the front room 
of a house. For a while there is a tendency to 
whisper, as if we were at a funeral, or as if, per- 
chance, the Germans in the sea could hear. But 
soon we find ourselves functioning quite normally. 
Not until the sixth day out, it is true, does any one 
venture to take a bath. You don't want to be rushed 
like that, you know, to your drowning. But we 
are sleeping regularly at night. We eat bacon and 
eggs for breakfast as usual. We are pleased when 
there is turkey and cranberry sauce for dinner. One 
does not maintain an agony of suspense forever. 
For most of us, I think it began to end when we had 
committed ourselves to the decision of this voyage. 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 79 

After that, the issue rests with God or with destiny, 
according to one's religion. 

There is no attempt at dressing for dinner on the 
Carmania. Evening dress and all the time dress is 
life-preservers. We do not take them off even at 
night for a while. We sleep in them. With the 
new styles, of which there are many, you can. Mine 
is a garment that buttons up exactly like a man's 
vest. Next to the lining is a padded filling, an In- 
dian vegetable matter that will keep one afloat like 
cork. To-day one desires the latest modern devices 
against death. A life-preserver costs anywhere from 
five to fifteen dollars. You carry yours with you 
as you do your toothbrush and your steamer-rug. 

Time ticks off the minutes to life or to death to- 
morrow. We walk the decks and scan a nearly de- 
serted ocean. Only twice do we sight a steamship 
on the horizon. At table we discuss as one does 
usually, oh, immortality and Christian Science and 
woman suffrage. The Englishman says, "Votes for 
women are really impossible, don't you know. 
Why, if the British women had voted twelve years 
ago, there might not have been any battleships in 
1914. And then where would England have been 
to-day 4 ?" 

"But if the German women too had voted twelve 
years ago, have you thought how much happier the 
world might be to-day*?" I ask. The Englishman 
does not see the point but the American at my left 
says, "Guess you handed him one that time." 



80 WOMEN WANTED 

On April sixth the Cunard Bulletin, the wireless 
newspaper, is laid beside our plates at breakfast with 
the announcement that's thrilled around a world, 
"The United States has declared for war." The 
Englishman next me says, "That must be a great 
relief for you." And I cannot answer for the chok- 
ing in my throat. My country, oh, my country, too, 
at the gates of hell to go in regiment by regiment! 

On Sunday the English clergyman reads the serv- 
ice including the phrases in brackets: "God save 
the King (and the President of the United States). 
Vanquish their enemies and preserve them in fe- 
licity." Down beneath the sea the Germans in their 
submarines too are praying like that to the same God. 
But one hopes, oh, one earnestly hopes, that God 
will not hear them. 

After the sixth day out, we have probably escaped 
the submarines. The American men are no longer 
kindly asking me in anxious tone, "You're not nerv- 
ous, are you?" On the eighth day they get out the 
shuffleboard. Two mornings later when we awake, 
the sea is a beautiful blue, all dimpling with spar- 
kling points of golden light. It is real New York 
sunlight again ! The captain comes down from the 
pilot-house smiling: "Well, we got away this 
time," he says. 

The Statue of Liberty is rising on the horizon. 
The Manhattan sky-line etches itself against the 
heavens. Do you know, I'd rather be a doorkeeper 
here at Ellis Island, than a lady-in-waiting any- 
where in Europe. The Carmania warps into dock 



CLOSE UP BEHIND THE LINES 81 

in sight of the Metropolitan Tower. Was Four- 
teenth Street ever cheap, common, sordid 4 ? As my 
taxicab rolls across town, see how beautiful, oh, see 
how beautiful is Fourteenth street, a little land- 
scape cross-section right out of Paradise! Nobody 
here is blinded, nobody maimed, nobody in crepe, 
nobody broken-hearted — yet. I have escaped from 
a nightmare of the Middle Ages. I lift my face to 
the sunlight again. 

I know I am tired, terribly tired of doing difficult 
things and saving my life from day to day. But 
I have not realised how near collapse I am until I 
drop in a chair before the Editor's deck in the office 
of the Pictorial Review. I, who have been so crazy 
to get to the country where there is still free speech, 
that I had insanely hoped to stand in Broadway and 
shout, have suddenly lost my voice. I can only re- 
port in a whisper ! 

My chief looks at me in concern. "For God's 
sake, girl," he says, "go somewhere and go to bed!" 



CHAPTER III 

Her Country's Call 

One Thousand Women Wanted! You may 
read it on a great canvas sign that stretches across 
an industrial establishment in lower Manhattan. 
The owner of this factory who put it there, only 
knows that it is an advertisement for labour of 
which he finds himself suddenly in need. But he 
has all unwittingly really written a proclamation 
that is a sign of the times. 

Across the Atlantic I studied that proclamation 
in Old World cities. Women Wanted! Women 
Wanted! The capitals of Europe have been for 
four years placarded with the sign. And now we 
in America are writing it on our sky line. All over 
the world see it on the street car barns as on the 
colleges. It is hung above the factories and the 
coal mines, the halls of government and the farm- 
yards and the arsenals and even the War Office. 
Everywhere from the fireside to the firing line, coun- 
try after country has taken up the call. Now it has 
become the insistent chorus of civilisation: Women 
Wanted ! Women Wanted ! 

But yesterday the great war was a phenomenon 

to which we in America thrilled only as its percus- 

82 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 83 

sions reverberated around the world. Now our own 
soldiers are marching down Main Street. But their 
uniforms still are new. Wait. Soon here too one 
shall choke with that sob in the throat. Oh, I am 
walking again in the garden of the Tuileries on a 
day when I had seen war without the flags flying and 
the bands playing. It was dead men and disabled 
men and hospitals full and insane asylums full and 
cemeteries full. "You have to remember," said a 
voice at my side, "that all freedoms since the world 
began have had to be fought for. They still have 
to be." 

So I repeat it now for you, the women of Amer- 
ica, resolutely to remember. And get our your Rob- 
ert Brownings! Read it over and over again, 
"God's in his heaven." For there are going to be 
days when it will seem that God has quite gone 
away. Still He hasn't. Suddenly in a lifting of 
the war clouds above the blackest battle smoke, we 
shall see again His face as a flashing glimpse of 
some new freedom lights for an instant the darkened 
heavens above the globe of the world. Already 
there has been a Russian revolution which may por- 
tend the end of a German monarchy. In England 
a new democracy has buckled on the sword of a dead 
aristocracy. And a great Commoner is at the helm 
of state. But with all the freedoms they are win- 
ning, there is one for which not the most decorated 
general has any idea he's fighting. I am not sure 
but it is the greatest freedom of all: when woman 
wins the race wins. The new democracv for which 



84 WOMEN WANTED 

a world has taken up arms, for the first time since 
the history of civilisation began, is going to be real 
democracy. There is a light that is breaking high 
behind all the battle lines! Look! There on the 
horizon in those letters of blood that promise of the 
newest freedom of all. When it is finished — the 
awful throes of this red agony in which a world is 
being reborn — there is going to be a place in the Sun 
for women. 

Listen, hear the call, Women Wanted ! Women 
Wanted! Last Spring the Government pitched a 
khaki colored tent in your town on the vacant lot 
just beyond the post office, say. How many men 
have enlisted there'? Perhaps there are seventy-five 
who have gone from the factory across the creek, 
and the receiving teller at the First National Bank, 
and the new principal of the High School where the 
children were getting along so well, and the doctor 
that everybody had because they liked him so much. 

And, oh, last week at dinner your own husband 
had but just finished carving when he looked across 
the table and said: "Dear, I can't stand it any 
longer. I'm going to get into this fight to make 
the world right." You know how your face went 
white and your heart for an instant stopped beating. 
But what I don't believe you do know is that you 
are at this moment getting ready to play your part 
in one of the most tremendous epochs of the world. 
It is not only Liege and the Marne and Somme, and 
Haig and Joffre and Petain and Pershing who are 
making history to-day. Keokuk, Iowa, and Kala- 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 85 

mazoo, Mich., and Little Falls, N. Y., are too — and 
you and the woman who lives next door ! 

THE NEW WOMAN MOVEMENT 

Every man who enlists at that tent near the post 
office is going to leave a job somewhere whether it's 
at the factory or the doctor's office or the school 
teacher's desk, or whether it's }^our husband. That 
job will have to be taken by a woman. It's what 
happened in Europe. It's what now we may see 
happen here. A great many women will have a 
wage envelope who never had it before. That may 
mean affluence to a housefull of daughters. One, 
two, three, four wage envelopes in a family where 
father's used to be the only one. You even may 
have to go out to earn enough to support yourself 
and the babies. Yes, I know your husband's army 
pay and the income from investments carefully ac- 
cumulated through the savings of your married life, 
will help quite a little. But with the ever rising 
war cost of living, it may not be enough. It hasn't 
been for thousands of homes in Europe. And even- 
tually you too may go to work as other women have. 
It's very strange, is it not, for you of all women who 
have always believed that woman's place was the 
home. And you may even have been an "anti," 
a most earnest advocate of an ancient regime against 
which whole societies and associations of what yes- 
terday were called "advanced" women organised 
their "suffrage" protests. 

To-day no one any longer has to believe what is 



86 WOMEN WANTED 

woman's place. No woman even has anything to 
say about it. Read everywhere the signs : Women 
Wanted! Here in New York we are seeing ship- 
load after shipload of men going out to sea in khaki. 
We don't know how many boat loads like that will 
go down the bay. But for an army of every million 
American men in Europe, there must be mobilised 
another million women to take their places behind 
the lines here 3,000 miles away from the guns, 
to carry on the auxiliary operations without which 
the armies in the held could not exist. 

In the department store where you shopped to- 
day you noticed an elevator girl had arrived, where 
the operator always before has been a boy! Out- 
side the window of my country house here as I write, 
off on that field on the hillside a woman is working, 
who never worked there before. At Lexington, 
Mass., I read in my morning paper, the Rev. Chris- 
topher Walter Collier has gone to the front in France 
and his wife has been unanimously elected by the 
congregation to fill the pulpit during his absence. 
Sometimes women by the hundred step into new 
vacancies. The /Eolian Company is advertising for 
women as piano salesmen and has established a spe- 
cial school for their instruction. A Chicago manu- 
facturing plant has hung out over its employment 
gate the announcement, "Man's work, man's pay for 
all women who can qualify," and within a week two 
hundred women were at work. The Pennsylvania 
railroad, which has rigidly opposed the employment 
of women on its office staffs, in June, 1917, an- 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 87 

nounced a change of policy and took on in its various 
departments five hundred women and girls. The 
Municipal Service Commission in New York last 
fall was holding its first examination to admit women 
to the position of junior draughtsmen in the city's 
employ. The Civil Service Commission at Wash- 
ington, preparing to release every possible man from 
government positions for war service, had compiled 
a list of 10,000 women eligible for clerical work 
in government departments. 

Like that it is happening all about us. This is 
the new woman movement. And you're in it. We 
all are. I know: you may never have carried a 
suffrage banner or marched in a suffrage procession 
or so much as addressed a suffrage campaign envel- 
ope. Rut you're "moving" to-day just the same if 
you've only so much as rolled a Red Cross bandage 
or signed a Food Administration pledge offered you 
by the women's committee of the Council of Na- 
tional Defence. All the women of the world are 
moving. 

"Suffrage de la mortc" a Senator on the Seine has 
termed the vote offered the French feminists in the 
form of a proposition that every man dying on the 
field of battle may transfer his ballot to a woman 
whom he shall designate. And the French women 
have drawn back in horror, exclaiming: "We don't 
want a dead man's vote. We want only our own 
vote." Nevertheless it is something like this which 
is occurring. 

And we may shudder, but we may not draw back. 



88 WOMEN WANTED 

It is by way of the place de la morte, that women 
are moving inexorably to-day into industry and com- 
merce and the professions, on to strange new des- 
tinies that shall not be denied. 

There on the firing line a bullet whizzes straight 
to the mark. A man drops dead in the trenches. 
Some wife's husband, some girl's sweetheart who be- 
fore he was a soldier was a wage earner, never will 
be more. Back home another woman who had been 
temporarily enrolled in the ranks of industry, steps 
forward, enlisted for life in the army of labour. 

Dear God, what a price to pay for the freedom the 
feminists have asked. But this is not our woman 
movement. This is His woman movement, who 
moves in mysterious ways His ends to command. 
We may not know. And we do not understand. 
But as we watch the war clouds, we see, as it were in 
the lightning flash of truth, the illuminated way 
that is opening for women throughout the world. 
It is westward to us that this star of opportunity has 
taken its course directly from above the battlefields 
of Europe. 

A WOMAN OF YESTERDAY LOOKS ON 

Women Wanted! Women Wanted! I am 
hearing it again over there. Outside the windows 
of my London hotel in Piccadilly, a shaft of sharp 
white light played against the blackness of the Lon- 
don sky. Down these beams that searched the night 
for enemy Zeppelins, a woman's figure softly moved. 
And as I looked, the close drawn curtains of my 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 89 

room, it seemed, parted and she stepped lightly 
across the window sill. She was gowned in a quaint, 
old-time costume. "They're not wearing them to- 
day," I smiled. 

She looked down at her cotton gown stamped with 
the broad arrows of Hollo way jail. There were 
women, you know, who suffered and died in that 
prison garb. The way of the broad arrow used to 
be the way of the cross for the woman's cause. 

"You ought to see the new styles," I said. "Gov- 
ernments are getting out so many new decorations for 
women." 

"Tell me," she answered. "Up in heaven we 
have heard that it is so. And I have come to see." 

So we went out together, the Soul of a Suffragette 
and I, to look on the Great Push of the new woman 
movement that is swinging down the twentieth cen- 
tury in sweeping battalions. It has the middle of 
the road and all the gates ahead are open wide. No 
ukase of parliament or king halts it. No church 
dogma anathematises it. No social edict ostracises 
it. The police do not arrest it and the hooligans 
do not mob it. No, indeed ! The applauding pop- 
ulace that's crying ''Place aux dames" would not 
tolerate any such treatment as that. And in fact, I 
don't think there's any one left in the world who 
would want to so much as pull out a hairpin of this 
triumphant processional. 

You see, it's so very different from the woman 
movement of yesterday. That was the crusade of 
the pioneers who gave their lives in the struggling 



90 WOMEN WANTED 

service of an unpopular ideal. Who wanted fem- 
inists free to find themselves? Even women them- 
selves came haltingly as recruits. But this is a pa- 
geant, with Everywoman crowding for place at her 
country's call. And who would not adore to be a 
patriot? It is with flying colors, albeit to the solemn 
measures of a Dead March that the new columns are 
coming on. 

It is the Woman Movement against which all the 
parliaments of men shall never again prevail. Ma- 
jestically, with sure and rhythmic tread, it is mov- 
ing, not under its own power of propaganda, but pro- 
pelled by fearful cosmic forces. At the compulsion 
of a sublime destiny accelerated under the aegis of 
a war office press bureau, suffragists pro and anti 
alike are gathered in. Theirs no longer to reason 
why. For see, they are keeping step, always keep- 
ing step with the armies at the front ! 

There is a new offensive on the Somme. There 
is a defeat at the Yser, a victory at Verdun or Marne. 
The dead men lie deep in the trenches ! The war 
office combs out new regiments to face the hell fire 
of shrapnel and the woman movement in all nations 
joins up new recruits to fill the vacant places from 
which the men, about to die, are steadily enlisted. 
See the sign of the times. I point it out to My 
Suffragette: "Women Wanted." With each year 
of war the demand becomes more insistent. Women 
Wanted ! Women Wanted ! 

"But they didn't used to be," she gasps in amaze- 
ment. 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 91 

And of course, I too remember when the world 
was barricaded against everywhere a woman wanted 
to go beyond the dishpan and the wash tub and the 
nursery. It all seems now such a long while ago. 

"Dear old-fashioned girl," I reply, "women no 
longer have to smash a way anywhere. They'll 
even be sending after you if you don't come." 

When the militants of England signed with their 
government the truce which abrogated for the period 
of the war the Cat and Mouse Act with which they 
had been pursued, it was the formal announcement 
to the world of the cessation of suffrage activities 
while the nations settled other issues. From Berlin 
to Paris and London, feminists acquiesced in the de- 
cision arrived at in Kingsway. It seemed indeed 
that the woman's cause was going to wait. But is 
it not written : "Whoso loseth his life," etc., "shall 
find it." 

Women Wanted ! Women Wanted ! "Listen," 
I say to the Soul of a Suffragette, as we stand in the 
Strand. "You hear it? And it's like that in the 
Avenue de 1' Opera and in Unter den Linden and in 
Petrograd and now in Broadway. To every woman, 
it is her country's call to service." 

I think we may write it down in history that on 
August 14, 1914, the door of the Doll's House 
opened. She who stood at the threshold where the 
tides of the ages surged, waved a brave farewell to 
lines of gleaming bayonets going down the street. 
Then the clock on her mantel ticked off the wonder- 
ful moment of the centuries that only God himself 



92 WOMEN WANTED 

had planned. The force primeval that had held 
her in bondage, this it was that should set her free. 
As straight as ever she went before to the altar 
and the cook stove and the cradle, she stepped out 
now into the wide wide world, the woman behind 
the man behind the gun. 

"See," I say to My Suffragette, "not all the po- 
litical economists from John Stuart Mill to Ellen 
Key could have accomplished it. Not even your 
spectacular martyrdom was able to achieve it. But 
now it is done. For lo, the password the feminists 
have sought, is found. And it is Love — not logic !" 

There are, the statisticians tell us, more than 
twenty million men numbered among the embattled 
hosts out there at the front where the future of the 
human race is being fought for. Modern warfare 
has most terrible engines of destruction. But with 
all of these at command, there is not a brigade of 
soldiers that could stand against their foes without 
the aid of the women who in the last analysis are 
holding the line. 

Who is it that is feeding and clothing and nursing 
the greatest armies of history 4 ? See that soldier in 
the trenches? A woman raised the grain for the 
bread, a woman is tending the flocks that provided 
the meat for his rations to-day. A woman made the 
boots and the uniform in which he stands. A woman 
made the shells with which his gun is loaded. A 
woman will nurse him when he's wounded. A 
woman's ambulance may even pick him up on the 
battlefield. A woman surgeon may perform the 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 93 

operation to save his life. And somewhere back 
home a woman holds the job he had to leave behind. 
There is no task to which women have not turned 
to-day to carry on civilisation. For the shot that 
was fired in Serbia summoned men to their most an- 
cient occupation — and women to every other. 

"All the suffrage flags are furled 4 ?" questions My 
Suffragette incredulously, as we pass through the 
streets where once her banners waved most mili- 
tantly. "Gone with your broad arrows of yester- 
day," I affirm. "And you should see our modern 
styles." 

NEW COSTUMES FOR NEW WOMEN 

When women stood at the threshold listening 
breathlessly that August day, there was one costume 
ready and laid out by the nations for their wear in 
every land. Coronets and shimmering ball gowns, 
cap and gown in university corridors and plain little 
home made dresses in rose-bowered cottages were 
alike exchanged for the new uniform and insignia. 
And the woman who set the sign of the red cross 
in the centre of her forehead appeared in her white 
gown and her flowing white head dress all over 
Europe as instantaneously as a new skirt ever flashed 
out in the pages of a fashion magazine. To her, 
every country called as naturally, as spontaneously 
as a hurt child might turn to its mother. She it is 
who has worn the red cross to her transfiguration in 
this new Woman Movement with one of the largest 
detachments in hospital service. See her on the 



94 WOMEN WANTED 

sinking hospital ships in the Channel or the Darda- 
nelles, insisting on "wounded soldiers first" as she 
passes her charges to safety, and waiting behind her- 
self goes quietly under the water. And with ban- 
daged eyes she has even walked unflinchingly to 
death before the levelled guns of the enemy soldiery, 
as did Edith Cavell in Belgium who went with her 
red cross to immortality. All the world has been 
breathless before the figure of the woman who dies 
to-day for her country like a soldier. No one knew 
that the Red Cross would be carried to these heights 
of Calvary. But from the day that the great slaugh- 
ter began, it was accepted as a matter of course that 
woman's place was going to be at the bedside of the 
wounded soldier. Even as the troops buckled on 
sword and pistol and the departing regiments began 
to move, it was made sure that she should be wait- 
ing for them on their return. 

In Germany in the first month of the war, no less 
than 70,000 women of the Vaterlandischer Frauen- 
verein, trained in first aid to the injured, had arrived 
at the doors of the Reichstag to offer themselves for 
Red Cross service. 

I remember in the spring of 1914 to have stood 
at Cecilienhaus in Charlottenburg. Cecilienhaus 
with its creche and its maternity care and its folks 
kitchens and its workingmen's gardens, was devoted 
to the welfare work in which the Vaterlandischer 
Frauenverein of the nation was engaged. Frau 
Oberin Hanna Kruger showed me with pride all 
these social activities. Then she looked away down 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 95 

the Berliner Strasse and said: "But when war 
comes — " Had I heard aright ? That you know 
was in May, 1914. But she repeated: "When 
war comes we are going to be able to take care of 
seventy-five soldiers in this dining-room and in that 
maternity ward we shall be able to have beds for 
a dozen officers." All over Germany the half mil- 
lion women of the Vaterlandischer Frauenverein 
planning like that, "when war comes," had taken a 
first aid nurse's training course. They were as ready 
for mobilisation as were their men. France, view- 
ing with alarm these preparations across the border, 
had her women also in training. The Association 
des Dames Francais, the Union des Femmes de 
France and the Societe Secours aux Blesses Mili- 
tairs, at once put on the Red Cross uniform and 
brought to their country's service 59,500 nurses. In 
England the Voluntary Aid Detachments of the Red 
Cross had 60,000 members ready to serve under the 
3,000 trained nurses who were registered for duty 
within a fortnight of the outbreak of war. Simi- 
larly every country engaged in the conflict, taking 
inventory of its resources, eagerly accepted the serv- 
ices of the war nurse. The same policy of state 
actuated every nation as was expressed by the Italian 
Minister of War who announced: "By utilising 
the services of women to replace men in the military 
hospitals, we shall release 20,000 soldiers for active 
duty at the front." 

The Red Cross of service to the soldier is the most 
conspicuous decoration worn by women in all war- 



96 WOMEN WANTED 

ring countries. Everywhere you meet the nurses' 
uniform almost as universally adopted a garb as was 
the shirt waist of yesterday. We are here at Char- 
ing Cross station where nightly under cover of the 
soft darkness the procession of grim grey motor am- 
bulances rolls out bearing the wounded. They are 
coming like this too at the Gare du Nord in Paris, 
at the Potsdam station in Berlin, and up in Petro- 
grad. In each ambulance between the tiers of 
stretchers on which the soldiers lie, you may see the 
figure of a woman silhouetted faintly against the dim 
light of the railroad station as she bends to smooth 
a pillow, to adjust a bandage, or now to light a ciga- 
rette for a maimed man who never can do that least 
service for himself again. She may be a peeress of 
the realm, or she may be a militant on parole granted 
the amnesty of her government that needs her more 
these days for saving life than for serving jail sen- 
tence. But look, and you shall see the Red Cross 
on her forehead! 

The grey ambulances like this coming from the 
railroad stations long ago in every land filled up the 
regular military hospitals through which the patients 
are passed by the thousands every month. And 
other women taking the Red Cross set it above the 
doorways of historic mansions opened to receive the 
wounded. In Italy, Queen Margherita and Oueen 
Elena gave their royal residences. In Paris Baron- 
ess Rothschild has made her beautiful house with 
its great garden behind a high yellow wall a Hopital 
Militaire Auxiliaire. And many private residences 




MRS. H. J. TENNANT 
Director of the Woman's 
England. Like this in al 
government councils. 



Department of National Service in 
lands, women have been called to 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 97 

like this are among the eight hundred hospitals in 
France which are being operated under the direc- 
tion of one woman's organisation alone, the Societe 
de Secours aux Blesses Militaires. 

Here in London, in Piccadilly, at Devonshire 
House, desks and filing cabinets fill the rooms once 
gay with social functions. And hospital messengers 
go and come up and down the marvellous gold and 
crystal staircase. The Duchess of Devonshire has 
turned over the great mansion as the official head- 
quarters for the Red Cross. Nearby, in Mayfair, 
Madame MoraviefT, whose husband is connected with 
the Russian diplomatic service, is serving as com- 
mandant for the hospital she has opened for English 
soldiers. Lady Londonderry's house in Park Lane 
is a hospital. By the end of the first year of war, 
like this, no less than 850 private residences in Eng- 
land had been transformed into Voluntary Aid De- 
tachment Red Cross Hospitals. 

In hospital financiering the American woman in 
Europe has led all the rest. Margaret Cox Benet, 
the wife of Lawrence V. Benet in Paris, braved the 
perils of the Atlantic crossing to appeal to America 
for contributions to the American Ambulance Hos- 
pital at Neuilly. It is equalled by only one other 
war hospital in Europe, the splendidly equipped 
hospital of the American women at Paignton, Eng- 
land, initiated by Lady Arthur Paget, formerly 
Mary Paran Stevens of New York. Lady Paget, 
who is president of the American Women's War 
Relief Fund, has just rounded out the first million 



98 WOMEN WANTED 

dollars of the fund which she has personally raised 
for war work. 

You see how these also serve who are doing the 
executive and organisation work that makes it pos- 
sible for the woman in the front lines to wear her red 
cross even to her transfiguration. Accelerated by 
the activities of women like these behind the lines, 
the Red Cross battalions are leading the Great Push 
of the new woman movement. The woman in the 
nurse's uniform is not exciting the most comment, 
however. It is by reason of her numbers, the thou- 
sands and thousands of her that she commands the 
most attention. But she was really expected. 

WHERE YOU FIND THE MILITANTS TO-DAY 

For the amazing figure that has emerged by magic 
directly out of the battle smoke of this war, see the 
woman in khaki! Khaki, I explain to My Suffra- 
gette, is one of the most popular of government 
offerings for women's wear. The material has been 
found most serviceable in a war zone either to die 
in or to live in, while you save others from dying. 
It is sometimes varied with woollen cloth preferred 
for warmth. But the essential features of the cos- 
tume are preserved: the short skirt, the leather leg- 
gings, the military hat and the shoulder straps with 
the insignia of special service. When governments 
have called for unusual duty that is difficult or dis- 
agreeable or dangerous, it is the woman in khaki who 
responds: "Take me. I am here." She will, in 
fact, do anything that there's no one else to do. 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 99 

Stick-at-nothings, the London newspapers have 
nicknamed the women's Reserve Ambulance Corps 
of 400 women who wear a khaki uniform with a 
green cross armlet. With white tunics over these 
khaki suits, a detachment of green cross girls at Peel 
House, the soldiers' club in Westminster, does house- 
maid duty from seven in the morning until eight at 
night. They are making beds and waiting on table, 
these young women, who, many of them, in stately 
English homes have all their lives been served by 
butlers and footmen. I saw a Green Cross girl at 
the military headquarters of the corps in Piccadilly 
making to Commandant Mabel Beatty her report of 
another phase of war work. She was such a young 
thing, I should say perhaps eighteen, and delicately 
bred. I know I noticed the slender aristocratic hand 
that she lifted to her hat in salute to her superior 
officer: "I have," she said, "this morning burned 
three amputated arms, two legs and a section of a 
jaw bone. And I have carried my end of five heavy 
coffins to the dead wagon." That's all in her day's 
work. She's a hospital orderly. And it's one of 
the things an orderly is for, to dispose of the by- 
products of a great war hospital. 

See also, these ambulances that bring the wounded 
from Charing Cross. They are "manned" by a 
woman outside as well as the nurse within. There 
is a girl at the wheel in the driver's seat. The Mo- 
tor Transport Section of the Green Cross Society 
accomplishes an average weekly mileage of 2,000 
miles transporting wounded and munitions. Like 



ioo WOMEN WANTED 

this they respond for any service to which the exi- 
gencies of war may call. There was the time of the 
first serious Zeppelin raid on London when amid 
the crash of falling bombs and the horror of fire 
flaming suddenly in the darkness, the shrieks of the 
maimed and dying filled the night with terror and 
the populace seemed to stand frozen to inaction at 
the scene about them. Right up to the centre of 
the worst carnage rolled a Green Cross ambulance 
from which leaped out eight khaki clad women. 
They were, mind you, women of the carefully shel- 
tered class, who sit in dinner gowns under soft can- 
dle light in beautifully appointed English houses. 
And they never before in all their lives had wit- 
nessed an evil sight. But they set to work promptly 
by the side of the police to pick up the dead and the 
dying, putting the highway to order as calmly as 
they might have gone about adjusting the curtains 
and the pillows to set a drawing-room to rights. 
"Thanks," said the police, when sometime later an 
ambulance arrived from the nearest headquarters, 
"the ladies have done this job." Since then the 
Woman's Reserve Ambulance Corps is officially at- 
tached to the "D" Division of the Metropolitan Po- 
lice for air raid relief. 

That girl in khaki who is serving as a hospital 
orderly, you notice, wears shoulder straps of blue. 
She comes from the great military hospital in High 
Holborn that is staffed entirely by women. We 
may walk through the wards there where we shall 
see many of her. Above her in authority are women 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 101 

with shoulder straps of red. These are they who 
wear the surgeon's white tunic in the operating thea- 
tre, who issue the physician's orders at the patient's 
bedside. Now the door at the end of the ward 
opens. A woman with red shoulder straps stands 
there, whom every wounded patient able to lift his 
right arm, salutes as if his own military commander 
had appeared. "But it's my doctor, my doctor," 
exclaims the Suffragette of yesterday. 

And it is. The doctor, you see, used to hold in 
fact the unofficial post of first aid physician to the 
Women's Social and Political Union. Frequently 
she was wont to hurry out on an emergency call to 
attend some militant picked up cut and bleeding 
from the missiles of the mobs or released faint and 
dying from a hunger strike. And the doctor her- 
self did her bit in the old days. The Government 
had her in Holloway jail for six weeks. Well, to- 
day they have her as surgeon in command of this 
war hospital with the rank of major. She's so well 
fitted for the place, you see, by her earlier experi- 
ence. 

But, visibly agitated, My Suffragette again plucks 
at my sleeve : "Are you quite sure," she asks, "that 
Scotland Yard won't take her?" 

Poor dear lady of yesterday. They're not doing 
that to-day. Your woman movement was militant 
against the Government. This woman movement is 
militant with the Government. There's all the dif- 
ference in the world. And the woman in khaki has 
found it. Militancy of the popular kind has come 



102 WOMEN WANTED 

to be most exalted in woman. Besides a woman doc- 
tor is too valuable in these days to be interfered with. 
She is no longer sent as a missionary physician to 
the heathen or limited to a practice exclusively 
among women and children. She is good enough 
for anywhere. One issue of the Lancet advertises: 
"Women doctors wanted for forty municipal ap- 
pointments." Women doctors wanted, is the call 
of every country. This military hospital in London 
of which Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson, major, is in 
command, is entirely staffed with women. Paris 
has its war hospital with Dr. Nicole Gerard Mangin, 
major in command. Dr. Clelia Lollini, sub-lieu- 
tenant, is operating surgeon at a war hospital in 
Venice. In Russia one of the most celebrated war 
doctors is the Princess Gurdrovitz, surgeon in charge 
of the Imperial Hospital at Tsarkoe Selo. 

Oh, the khaki costume I think we may say is ad- 
mired of every war office. It has found a vogue 
among all the allies. It has appeared the past year 
in America, where it has been most recently adopted. 
But the model for whom it was particularly made to 
measure was the militant suffragette of England. 
Nearly everybody who used to be in Holloway jail is 
wearing it. It's the best fit that any of them find to- 
day in the shop windows of government styles. And 
it's so well adapted to women to whom all early Vic- 
torian qualities are as foreign as hoop skirts. You 
would not expect one inured to hardship by alternate 
periods of starvation and forcible feeding to be either 
a fearsome or a delicate creature. And the courage 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 103 

that could horsewhip a prime minister or set off a 
bomb beneath a bishop's chair, is just the kind that 
every nation's calling for in these strenuous times. 
It's the kind that up close to the firing line gets men- 
tioned in army orders and decorated with all crosses 
of iron and gold and silver. 

You will find the woman who has put on khaki at 
the front in all the warring countries. The Duchess 
of Aosta is doing ambulance work in Italy. The 
Countess Elizabeth ShouvalerT of Petrograd com- 
manded her own hospital train that brought in the 
wounded. But it is the British woman in khaki who 
has gone farthest afield. The National Union's 
"Scottish Women's Hospitals," as they are known, 
are right behind the armies. Staffed from the sur- 
geons to the ambulance corps entirely by women, 
they go out to any part of the war zone where the 
need is greatest. 

See the latest "unit" that is leaving Paddington 
Station. The equipment they are taking with them 
includes every appliance that will be required, from 
a bed to a bandage, and numbers just 1,051 bales 
and cases of freight. The entire unit, forty-five 
women, have had their hair cut short. For sanitary 
reasons, is the euphemistic way of explaining it. 
For protection against the vermin with which pa- 
tients from the trenches will be infested, if you ask 
for war facts as they are. Units like this have gone 
out to settle wherever by army orders a place has 
been made for them, in a deserted monastery in 
France that they must first scrub and clean, in a 



104 WOMEN WANTED 

refugee barracks in Russia, in a tent in Serbia where 
they themselves must dig the drainage trenches. 

Their surgeons have stood at the operating table 
a week at a stretch with only an hour or two of sleep 
each night. Their doctors have battled with epi- 
demics of typhoid and plague. Their ambulance 
girls have brought in the wounded from the battle- 
field under shell-fire. Hospitals have been con- 
ducted under bombardment with all the patients 
carried to the cellar. Hospitals have been captured 
by the enemy. Hospitals have been evacuated at 
command with the patients loaded on trains or motor 
cars or bullock wagons for retreat with the army. 
There were forty-six British women who shared in 
the historic retreat of the Serbian army three hun- 
dred miles over the Plain of Kossovo and the moun- 
tains of Albania. Men and cattle perished by the 
score. But the women doctors, freezing, starving, 
sleeping in the fields, struggling against a blinding 
blizzard with an amazing physical endurance and a 
dauntless courage, all came through to Scutari. Out 
on the far-flung frontiers of civilisation, the woman 
in khaki who has done these things is memorialised. 
At Mladanovatz, the Serbians have erected a foun- 
tain with the inscription : "In memory of the Scot- 
tish Women's Hospitals and their founder, Dr. Elsie 
Inglis." 

SUFFRAGISTS LED ALL THE REST 

When the great call, "Women wanted," first com- 
menced in all lands, there were those who stood with 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 105 

reluctant feet at the threshold simply because they 
did not know how to step out into the new wide 
world of opportunity stretching before them. In 
this crisis it was to the suffragists that every govern- 
ment turned. Who else should organise'? These 
women, like My Suffragette, had devoted their lives 
to assembling cohorts for a cause ! The Assoziazione 
per la Donna in Italy, as the Conseil National des 
Femmes Franchises in France, promptly responded 
by offering their office machinery as registration bu- 
reaus through which women could be drafted into 
service. It was the suffrage association at Buda- 
pest, Hungary, that filled the order from the city 
government for five hundred women street sweepers. 
The Vaterlandischer Frauenverein assembled 25,000 
women in Berlin alone to take the course of training 
arranged for helferinnen, assistants in all phases of 
relief work. But it was in England where the 
woman movement of yesterday had reached its high- 
est point in organisation that the woman movement 
for to-day was best equipped to start. Britain 
counted among the nation's resources no less than 
fifty separate suffrage organisations, one of which 
alone, the National Union of Women's Suffrage So- 
cieties, was able to send out its instructions to over 
500 branches ! And the mobilisation of the woman 
power of a nation was under way on a scale that 
could have been witnessed in no other era of the 
world. 

The woman who has been enlisted in largest num- 
bers in England as in other lands is the woman who 



106 WOMEN WANTED 

at her country's call hung up the housewife's kitchen 
apron in plain little cottages to put on a new uniform 
with a distinctive feature that has been hitherto 
conspicuously missing from women's clothes. It has 
a pocket for a pay envelope. "See," I say to My 
Suffragette, "you would not know her at all, now, 
would you?" 

She came marching through the streets of London 
on July 17, 1915, in one of the most significant 
detachments mustered for the new woman move- 
ment, 40,000 women carrying banners with the new 
device: "For men must fight and women must 
work." And industry, in which she was enlisting, 
presented her with a new costume. The Ministry 
of Munitions in London got out the pattern. Em- 
ployers of labour throughout the world are now 
copying it. There isn't anything in the chorus 
more attractive than the woman who's walked into 
the centre of the stage in shop and factory wearing 
overall trousers, tunic and cap. Some English fac- 
tories have the entire woman force thus uniformed 
and others have adopted only the tunic. Here are 
girl window cleaners with pail and ladder coming 
down the Strand wearing the khaki trousers. The 
girl conductor of the omnibus that's just passed has 
a very short skirt that just meets at the knees her 
high leather leggins. The girl lift operators at the 
stores in Oxford Street are in smart peg-top trousers. 
In Germany the innovation is of course being done 
by imperial decree, a government order having put 
all the railway women in dark grey, wide trousers. 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 107 

In France the new design is accepted slowly. The 
girl conductor who swings at the open door of the 
Paris Metro with a whistle at her lips, wears the 
men employe's cap but she still clings to her own 
"tablier." 

That July London procession organised by the 
suffragists, led in fact by Mrs. Pankhurst herself, in 
response to labour's call, "Women wanted," is the 
last suffrage procession of which the world has heard. 
And it is the most important feminist parade that 
has ever appeared in any city of the world. For it 
was a procession marching straight for the goal of 
economic independence. It was the vanguard of 
the moving procession of women that in every coun- 
try is still continuously passing into industry. Ger- 
many in the first year of war had a half million 
women in one occupation alone, that of making 
munitions. France has 400,000 "munitionettes." 
Great Britain in 1916 had a million women who had 
enlisted for the places of men since the war began. 
In every one of Europe's warring countries and now 
in America, women are being rushed as rapidly as 
possible into commerce and industry to release men. 
In Germany nearly all the bank clerks are women. 
The Bank of France alone in Paris has 700 women 
clerks. In England women clerks number over 
100,000. And the British Government is steadily 
advertising: Wanted, 30,000 women a week to re- 
place men for the armies. 

"Who works, fights," Lloyd George has said, in 
the English Parliament. English women enlisting 



108 WOMEN WANTED 

for agriculture have been given a government cer- 
tificate attesting : "Every woman who helps in agri- 
culture during the war is as truly serving her country 
as is the man who is fighting in trenches or on the 
sea." 

"But," protests the bewildered woman from only 
the other day, "they told us that women didn't 
know enough to do man's work, that she wasn't 
strong enough for much of anything beyond light 
domestic duty like washing and scrubbing and cook- 
ing and raising a family of six or eight or ten chil- 
dren." 

"Nothing that anybody ever said about women 
before August, 1914," I answer, "goes to-day. All 
the discoveries the scientists thought they had made 
about her, all the reports the sociologists solemnly 
filed over her, all the limitations the educators laid 
on her and all the jokes the punsters wrote about 
her — everything has gone to the scrap heap as repu- 
diated as the one-time theory that the earth was 
square instead of round. Everything they said she 
wasn't and she couldn't and she didn't, she now is 
and she can and she does." 

IT IS UNIVERSAL SERVICE 

Even women who do not need to work for pay 
are working without it and adding to the demonstra- 
tion of what women can do. See the colonel's lady 
taking the place of Julie O'Grady at the lathe for 
week-end work in the munition factories to release 
the regular worker for one day's rest in seven. Lady 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 109 

Lawrence in a white tunic and wearing a diamond 
wrist watch is in charge of the canteen at the Wool- 
wich Arsenal, supervising the serving of kippers and 
toast at the tea hour for the 2,000 women employes. 
Lady Sybil Grant, Lord Rosebery's daughter, is the 
official photographer to the Royal Naval Air Service 
at Roehampton. The Countess of Limerick, as- 
sisted by fifty women of title, among them Lady 
Randolph Churchill, is running the Soldiers' Free 
Refreshment Buffet at the London Bridge Station. 
The Marchioness of Londonderry, directing the Mili- 
tary Cookery Section of the Women's Legion, has 
given to her nation the woman army cook who has 
recently replaced 5,000 men. Women of world- 
wide fame have cheerfully turned to the task that 
called. Beatrice Harraden, celebrated author of 
"Ships That Pass in the Night," is in the uniform 
of an orderly at the Endel Street War Hospital, 
where she has done a unique service in organising 
the first hospital library for the patients. May Sin- 
clair, whose recent book, "The Three Sisters," is one 
of the great contributions to feminist literature, is 
enrolled as a worker at the Kensington War Hospi- 
tal Supply Department. She has invented the ma- 
chine used there to turn out "swabs" seven times 
faster than formerly they were made by hand. 

There is the greatest diversity in war service. 
One of the first calls answered by the suffragists was 
for an emergency gang of 300 women from the 
metropolis to supervise the baling of hay for the 
army. Lloyd George has been supplied with a 



no WOMEN WANTED 

woman secretary and a woman chauffeur, the latter 
a girl who was a celebrated hunger striker before the 
war. In the royal dockyards and naval establish- 
ments there are 7,000 women employed. Through 
the Woman's National Land Service Corps 5,000 
university and other women of education have been 
recruited to serve as forewomen of detachments of 
women farm labourers. The army last spring was 
asking for 6,000 women at the War Office to assist 
in connection with the work of the Royal Flying 
Corps. Oh, the list of what women are doing to-day 
is as indefinitely long as everything that there is to 
be done. 

And the woman movement sweeps on directly 
toward the gates of government. See the woman 
war councillor who recently arrived in 1916. She 
came into view first in Germany, where Frau Kom- 
merzienrat Hedwig Heyl of Berlin is a figure almost 
as important as is the Imperial Chancellor. The 
daughter of the founder of the North German Lloyd 
Line, herself the president of the Berlin Lyceum 
Club and the manager of the Heyl Chemical Works, 
in which she succeeded her late husband as presi- 
dent, Frau Heyl knows something of organisation. 
And she it is who has been responsible more than 
any other of the Kaiser's advisers for the conserva- 
tion of the food supply which keeps the German 
armies strong against a world of its opponents. The 
second day after war was declared, in conference 
with the Minister of the Interior, she had formulated 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL in 

the plan that by night the Government had tele- 
graphed to every part of Germany : there was formed 
the Nationaler Frauendien to control all of the activ- 
ities of women during the war. She was placed at 
the head of the Central Commission. It was the 
Nationaler Frauendien that made the suggestions 
which the Government adopted for the conservation 
of the food supply. And it was they who were en- 
trusted with organising the food supplies of the 
nation and educating the women in their use to the 
point of highest efficiency. As a personal contribu- 
tion to this end, Frau Heyl has published a War 
Cook Book, arranged an exhibit of substitute foods 
for war use, and has turned one section of her chem- 
ical works into a food factory from which she sup- 
plies the government with 6,000 pounds of tinned 
meat a day for the army. 

, After all, who are the real food controllers of a 
nation? Could a minister of finance, for instance, 
bring up a family on, say, 20 shillings a week? Yet 
there were women in every nation doing that before 
they achieved fame on the firing line and in the 
making of munitions. Last spring, as the food 
question became a gravely determining factor in the 
war, it began to be more and more apparent that the 
feminine mind trained to think in terms of domestic 
economy, might have something of value to con- 
tribute to questions of state. Why let Germany 
monopolise this particular form of efficiency? And 
England in 1917 called to its Ministry of Food two 



112 WOMEN WANTED 

women, Mrs. Pember Reeves, one of its radical suf- 
fragists, and Mrs. C. S. Peel, the editor of a woman's 
magazine and a cook book. 

About the same time each of the warring nations 
decided that the mobilised women forces everywhere 
could be most efficiently directed by women. Ger- 
many appointed as an attache for each of the six 
army commands throughout the empire a woman 
who is to serve as "Directress of the Division for 
Women's Service." From Dr. Alice Salomon in 
the Berlin-Potsdam district to Fraulein Dr. Ger- 
trude Wolf in the Bavarian War Bureau, each of 
these new appointees is a feminist leader from that 
woman movement of yesterday. In France the en- 
rolment of French women is under the direction of 
Mme. Emile Boutroux and Mme. Emile Borel. In 
England the highest appointment for a woman since 
the war is the calling of Mrs. H. J. Tennant, the 
prominent suffragist, to be Director of the Woman's 
Department of National Service. America, prepar- 
ing to enter the great conflict in the spring of 1917, 
at the very outset organised a Woman's Division of 
the National Defence Council and called to its com- 
mand Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the great suffrage 
leader. 

It's a long way back to the Doll's House, isn't it, 
with woman's place to-day in the workshop and the 
factory, the war hospital, the war zone and the war 
office? And now they are calling women to the 
electorate. Russia has spoken, England has spoken. 
America is making ready. Doesn't Mr. Kipling 



HER COUNTRY'S CALL 113 

want to revise his verses : "When man gathers with 
his fellow braves for council, he does not have a place 
for her"? 

It rrally has ceased to be necessary for woman any 
longer to plead her cause. Every government's do- 
ing it for her. The woman movement now is both 
called and chosen. And the British Government is 
the most active feminist advocate of all. The great- 
est brief for the woman's cause that ever was ar- 
ranged is a handsome volume on "Women's War 
Work," issued by the British War Office, as a guide 
to employers of labour throughout the United King- 
dom. This famous publication lists exactly ninety- 
six trades and 1,701 jobs which the Government says 
women can do just as well as men, some of them 
even better. A second publication issued in London 
with the approval of the War Office, sets forth in 
more literary form "Women's Work in Wartime," 
and is dedicated to "The Women of the Empire, 
God save them every one." 

It was in 1916 that I talked with a German gen- 
tleman who is near enough to the Kaiser to voice 
the point of view from that part of the world. 
"Women from now on are going to have a more im- 
portant place in civilisation than they ever have held 
before," affirmed Count von BernstorfF as we sat in 
his official suite at the Ritz Hotel in New York. 
"In the ultimate analysis," he spoke slowly and im- 
pressively, "in the ultimate analysis," he repeated, 
"it is the nation with the best women that's going to 
win this war." 



114 WOMEN WANTED 

"Do you know what I think ?" says the Soul of 
a Suffragette as we stand before the Great Push. 
"I think that whoever else wins this war, woman 
wins." 

Her country's call? Listen: there is a higher 
overtone — her man's call. Is it not the woman be- 
hind the man behind the gun who has achieved her 
apotheosis'? 



CHAPTER IV 

Women Who Wear War Jewelry 

There is a new kind of jewelry that will be com- 
ing out soon. We shall see it probably this season 
or at least within the next few months. It will take 
precedence of all college fraternity pins and suffrage 
buttons and society insignia and even of the costliest 
jewels. For it will be unique. Since no American 
woman has ever before worn it. 

As a Mayflower descendant or a Colonial Dame or 
a Daughter of the Revolution, you may have proudly 
pinned on the front of your dress the badge that 
establishes your title perhaps to heroic ancestry. In 
the gilt cabinet in the front parlour you may even 
cherish among curios of the wide, wide world a 
medal of honour as your choicest family heirloom. 
Who was it who won it, grandfather or great-grand- 
father or great-great-grandfather % Anyway, it was 
that soldier lad of brave uniformed figure whose 
photograph you will find in the old album that dis- 
appeared from the centre-table something like a gen- 
eration ago. We are getting them out from the 
attics now, the dusty, musty albums, and turning 
their pages reverently to look into the pictured eyes 
of the long ago. Some one who still recalls it must 

115 



n6 WOMEN WANTED 

tell us again this soldier-boy's story. Somewhere he 
did a deed of daring. Somehow he risked his life for 
his country. And a grateful government gave him 
this, his badge of courage. It's fine to have in the 
family, there in the parlour cabinet. You are proud, 
are you not, to be of a brave man's race 4 ? But blood, 
they say, will always tell. Heroism and daring may 
be pulsing in your veins to-day as once in his. 

Have you ever thought how it might be to have 
your own badge of courage 4 ? Ah, yes, even though 
you are a woman. No, it is true, there are no such 
decorations that have been handed down from grand- 
mother or great-grandmother or great-great-grand- 
mother. It is not that they did not deserve them. 
But their deeds were done too far behind the front 
for that recognition. To-day, as it happens, the new 
woman movement has advanced right up to the 
firing-line, and it's different. Every nation fighting 
over in Europe is bestowing honours of war on 
women. There is no reason to doubt that special 
acts of gallantry and service on the part of American 
women now in action with the hospitals and relief 
agencies that have accompanied our troops abroad, 
shall be similarly recognised by the War Depart- 
ment. To earn a decoration, you see — not merely 
to inherit one — that can be done to-day. 

She was the first war heroine I had ever seen, 
Eleanor Warrender. Over in London I gazed at 
her with bated breath — and to my surprise and as- 
tonishment found her just like other women. 

Among those called to the colours in England in 



WAR JEWELRY 117 

1914, she is one of the specially distinguished who 
have followed the battle-flags to within sight of the 
trenches, within sound of the guns. And, somehow, 
one will inadvertently think of these as some sort of 
super-woman. Before this there have been those 
who did what they could for their men under arms. 
There was one woman who risked her life heroically 
for British soldiers. And Florence Nightingale's 
statue has been set along with those of great men in 
a London public square. In this war many women 
are risking their lives. They are receiving all the 
crosses of iron and silver and gold. And to the lady 
of the decoration who wears this war jewelry, it is a 
souvenir of sights such as women's eyes have seldom 
or never looked on before since the world began. 

I have said that Eleanor Warrender seemed to me 
just like other women. And she is at first; other 
war heroines are. Until you catch the expression 
in their eyes, which affords you suddenly, swiftly, 
the fleeting glimpse of the soul of a woman who 
knows. There is that about all real experience that 
does not fail to leave its mark. You may get it in 
the quality of the voice, in a chance gesture that is 
merely the sweep of the hand, or in the subtle ema- 
nation of the personality that we call atmosphere. 
But wherever else it may register, there are unveiled 
moments when you may read it in the eyes of these 
women who know — that they have seen such agony 
and suffering and horror as have only been approxi- 
mated before in imaginative writing. The ancient 
pagans mentioned in their books that have come 



n8 WOMEN WANTED 

down to us, a place they called Hades, where every- 
thing conceivable that was frightful and awful 
should happen. The Christians called it Hell. 

But nobody had been there. And there were 
those in very modern days who said in their superior 
wisdom that it could not be, that it did not exist. 
Now how are we all confounded! For it is here 
and now. The Lady with the Decoration has seen 
it. Look, I say, in her eyes. 

For that is where you will find out. She does not 
talk of what she has been through. 

"My friend Eleanor Warrender," Lady Randolph 
Churchill told me, "has been under shell-fire for 
three years, nursing at hospitals all along the front 
from Furnes to the Vosges Mountains. Sometimes 
she has spent days with her wounded in dark cellars 
where they had to take refuge from the bombs that 
came like hail — and the cellars were infested with 
rats." 

Eleanor Warrender, when I saw her, came into the 
Ladies' Empire Club at 67 Grosvenor Street, Lon- 
don. 

High-bred, tall, and slender, she wore the severe 
tailor-made suit in which you expect an English- 
woman to be attired. In the buttonhole of her left 
coat-lapel there was a dark silk ribbon striped in a 
contrasting colour from which hung a small bronze 
Maltese cross. It is the Croix de Guerre bestowed 
on her by the French Government for "conspicuous 
bravery and gallant service at the front." She 
dropped easily on a chintz-covered lounge before the 



WAR JEWELRY 119 

grate fire in the smoking-room. A club-member 
caught sight of the ribbon in the coat-lapel. "I say, 
Eleanor," she said eagerly, coming over to exam- 
ine it. 

Miss Warrender was home on leave. In a few- 
days she would be returning again to her unit in 
France. She has been living where one does not get 
a bath every day and there are not always clean 
sheets. One sleeps on the floor if necessary, and 
what water there is available sometimes must be 
carefully saved for dying men to drink. The Red 
Cross flag that floats over the hospital is of no pro- 
tection whatever. Sometimes it seems only a men- 
ace, as if it were a sign to indicate to the enemy 
where they may drop bombs on the most helpless. 

There is a slight soft patter at the window-pane 
and it isn't rain. It's shrapnel. The warning 
whistle has just sounded. There is the cry in the 
streets — "Gardez vousl" The taubes are here. A 
Zeppelin bomb explodes on contact, so you seek 
safety in the cellar, which it may not reach. But a 
taube bomb, small and pointed, pierces a floor and 
explodes at the lowest level reached. So you may 
not flee from a taube bomb to anywhere. You just 
stay with your wounded and wait. Ah, there is the 
explosion which makes the cots here in the ward rock 
and the men shake as with palsy and turn pale. 
But, thank God, this time the explosion is outside 
and in the garden. Beyond the window there, what 
was a flower-bed three minutes ago is an upturned 
heap of earth and stone. They are bringing in now 



i2o WOMEN WANTED 

four more patients for whom room must be made 
besides these from the battlefield that have been 
operated on, twenty of them, since nine o'clock this 
morning. These four who are now being laid ten- 
derly on the white cots have two of them had their 
legs blown off, and two others are already dying from 
wounds more mortal. 

Eleanor Warrender a little later closes their eyes 
in the last sleep. She has watched beside hundreds 
of men like that as they have gone out into the 
Great Beyond. And just now she walks into the 
Ladies' Empire Club as calmly as if she had but 
come from a shopping tour in Oxford Street. Ah, 
well, but one can suffer just so much, as on a musical 
instrument you may strike the highest key and you 
may strike it again and again until it flats a little 
on the ear because you have become so accustomed 
to it. But it is the limit. It is the highest key. 
There is nothing more beyond, at least. And that is 
what you feel ultimately about these women who 
have come through the experience that leads to the 
decoration. It is one in the most constant danger 
who arrives at length at the most constant calm. 

"I don't know really why it should be called brav- 
ery," says Eleanor Warrender's quiet voice. "You 
see, a bomb has never dropped on me, so I have no 
actual personal experience of what it would be like. 
Now in that old convent in Flanders turned into a 
hospital, Sister Gertrude at the third cot from where 
I stood had a leg blown off, and Sister Felice had lost 
an arm, and I think it was very brave of them to go 




THE VISCOUNTESS ELIZABETH BENOIT D AZY 
Of the old French aristocracy, one of the most conspicuous ex- 
amples that the war affords of noblesse oblige in the Red Cross 
Service. 



WAR JEWELRY 121 

right on nursing in the danger zone afterward. But 
I — as I have said — no bomb has ever hit me. And 
having no experience of what the sensation would be 
like, it isn't particularly brave of me to go about my 
business without special attention to a danger of 
which I have no experience of pain to remember. 
As for death," and Eleanor Warrender looked out 
in Grosvenor Street into the yellow grey London 
fog, "as for death, it is, after all, only an episode. 
And what does it matter whether one is here or 
there?" 

Eleanor Warrender and others have gone out into 
the great experience on the borderland with death 
from quiet and uneventful lives of peace such as 
ours in America up to the present have also been. 
The call is coming now to us in pleasant cities and 
nice little villages all over the United States, and the 
time is here when we too are summoned from the 
even tenor of our wa)^s because the high white flash- 
ing moment of service is come. Eleanor Warrender 
was called quite suddenly from a stately career as an 
English gentlewoman. She kept house for her 
brother, Sir George Warrender, afterward in the war 
Admiral Warrender. It was a lovely old country 
house, High Grove, at Pinnar, in Middlesex County, 
of which she was the chatelaine. There had been a 
delightful week-end party there for which she was 
the hostess. She stood on a porch embowered in 
roses to bid her guests good-bye on an afternoon in 
August. And she had no more idea than perhaps 
you have who have touched lightly the hand of 



122 WOMEN WANTED 

friends who have gone out from your dinner table 
to-night, that the farewell was final. But two days 
later in a Red Cross uniform she was on her way to 
her place by the bedside of the war wounded. 
There has been no more entertaining since, and one 
cannot say when Eleanor Warrender shall ever again 
see English roses in bloom. 

THE DEMAND DEVELOPS THE CAPACITY 

The Viscountess Elizabeth D'Azy had been with 
her young son passing a summer holiday at a water- 
ing-place in France. 

She had just sent the boy back to boarding-school 
and herself had returned to her apartment in Paris 
overlooking the Esplanade des Invalides. At the 
moment she had no more intention of becoming a 
war heroine than of becoming a haloed plaster saint 
set in a niche in the Madeleine. Yet before she had 
ordered her trunks to be unpacked, the nation's call 
for Red Cross women had reached her. 

"It was so sudden," she has told me, "and I was 
so dazed, I couldn't even remember where I had put 
my Red Cross insignia. At last my maid found it 
in my jewel-case beneath my diamond necklace. I 
hadn't even seen it since I had received it at the end 
of my Red Cross first-aid course of lectures." The 
maid packed a suitcase of most necessary clothing. 
Carrying this suitcase, the Viscountess Elizabeth 
Benoit D'Azy, daughter of the Marquis de Vogue of 
the old French aristocracy, in August, 1914, walked 
with high head and firm tread out of a life of luxury 



WAR JEWELRY 123 

and ease into the place of toil and privation and self- 
sacrifice at the Vosges front where her country had 
need of her. 

That was, I think, the last time a maid has done 
anything for her for whom up to that day in August 
there had been servants to answer her least request. 
Ever since then the Viscountess D'Azy has been doing 
things with her own hands for the soldiers of France. 
It was in the second year of the war that a gentleman 
of France, General JofFre, bent to kiss her small 
hand, now toil-hardened and not so white as it used 
to be. There is a military group in front of a hos- 
pital that she commands and they stand directly be- 
fore a great jagged hole in the wall torn there by a 
German bomb, which, as it fell, missed her by a few 
metres. The General is giving her the "accolade," 
and on the front of her white uniform he has pinned 
the Croix de Guerre of France for distinguished serv- 
ice. Last year, on behalf of her grateful country, 
the Minister of War conferred on her another deco- 
ration, the Medaille de Vermeil des Epidemies. I 
do not know what others may have been added since 
to these with which the front of her white blouse 
sagged last spring in Paris. 

But the woman thus cited for military honours 
had before this Armageddon as little expectation of 
playing any such role as have you to-day who are, 
say, the social leader of the four hundred in Los 
Angeles or the president of a foreign missionary 
society in Bangor, Maine. Her one preparation was 
that two months' course of Red Cross lectures. 



124 WOMEN WANTED 

Many women of the leisure class were taking it in 
1910. 

"I think I will, too," she had said to her husband. 
"Some elemental knowledge of the scientific facts of 
nursing I really ought to have when the children are 
ill." There were five children, four little daughters 
and a son. And the Viscount thought of them and 
reluctantly gave his consent. 

"Very well, Elizabeth," he had said. "I think I 
am willing that you should hear the lectures. But 
on this I shall insist, my dear: I cannot permit 
you to take the practical bedside demonstration work. 
I don't wish to think of my wife doing that kind of 
menial service even for instruction purposes, and I 
simply could not have you so exposed to all sorts 
of infection." 

Like that it happened when Elizabeth, the Vis- 
countess D'Azy, arrived at the battle-front to which 
she was first called at Gerardmer; she had had no 
practical nursing experience. Oh, she got it right 
away. She had quite some within twenty-four 
hours. But up to now, this flashing white moment 
of life which she faced so suddenly, she had not so 
much as filled a hot-water bag for any one. And she 
had never seen a man die. 

At this military barracks where she took off her 
hat to don the flowing white headdress with the red 
cross in the centre of the forehead, one hundred 
and fifty men, some of them delirious with agony, 
some of them just moaning with pain, all of them 
wounded and waiting most necessary attention, lay 



WAR JEWELRY 125 

on the straw on the floor ranged against the wall. 

There weren't even cots. And there was only her- 
self with one other woman to assist her in doing all 
that must be done for these one hundred and fifty 
helpless men. 

The first that she remembers, a surgeon was call- 
ing out orders to her like a pistol exploding at her 
head. She got him a basin of water and some ab- 
sorbent cotton and she managed to find the ether. 
Oh, his shining instruments were flashing horribly in 
the light from the window. He was going to cut 
off a man's leg. "But, Doctor," she exclaimed, "I 
never had that in my Red Cross training. I don't 
know how." She went so white that he looked at 
her and he hesitated. "Go out in the garden out- 
side," he commanded, "and walk in the air." He 
looked at his watch. "I'll give you just three min- 
utes. Come back then and we'll do this job." 

They did this job, the Viscountess D'Azy holding 
the patient's leg while they did it. "After that," 
she has told me, "I was never nervous. I was never 
afraid. There wasn't anything I couldn't do." 

And there wasn't anything she didn't do. There 
were always the one hundred and fifty men to be 
cared for: as fast as a cot was vacated for the 
grave, it was filled again from the battle-line. For 
six weeks the Viscountess was on her feet for seven- 
teen hours out of every twenty-four, carrying water, 
preparing food, dressing wounds, closing the eyes of 
dying men. It took from eight in the morning until 
five in the afternoon just to do the dressings alone. 



126 WOMEN WANTED 

Twelve men on an average died every night and they 
wrapped them in white sheets for the burial, the 
Viscountess D'Azy did, daughter of one of the proud- 
est houses of France. 

One day the message came that the Germans, 
sweeping through the nearby village of St. Die, had 
denuded the hospital there of all supplies. Would 
the Viscountess with her influence, the commandant 
begged, carry a report of their need to Paris. She 
went to Paris and brought back a truck-load of sup- 
plies. She and the driver were three days on the 
return journey. German shells were again falling 
on the road to St. Die as they approached. The 
chauffeur stopped in terror. "Go on !" commanded 
the Viscountess. "Go on!" As the car shot for- 
ward by her order, a bomb dropped behind them, 
tearing up in a cloud of dust the exact spot in the 
road where the car had halted. 

Word reached military headquarters of Elizabeth 
D'Azy's skill in nursing, of her unflinching coolness 
in the face of all danger. It was decided that the 
war department had need of her at Dunkirk. The 
town was under heavy bombardment, receiving be- 
tween three hundred and four hundred bombs daily. 
At the barracks hospital, arranged at the railway- 
station, there were cots for two hundred wounded. 
Sometimes a thousand men were laid out on the 
floors. One night there were three thousand. And 
there was only the Viscountess, who was the com- 
mandant, one trained nurse, and some voluntary un- 
trained assistants. For a protection against the Zep- 



WAR JEWELRY 127 

pelins it was necessary that there should be only the 
dimmest candle light even for the performing of 
operations. As rapidly as possible patients were 
evacuated to base hospitals. The commandant one 
night was tenderly supervising the lifting into an 
American ambulance of an officer whose wounds she 
had just bandaged. She leaned over the wheel to 
admonish "Drive slowly or he cannot live." And as 
she touched the driver's arm there was an exclama- 
tion of mutual surprise. The driver was A. Piatt 
Andrews, under secretary of the treasury in Presi- 
dent Taft's administration. And the last time he 
had seen the Viscountess D'Azy he had taken her in 
to dinner at the White House in Washington when 
her husband was an attache there of the French Em- 
bassy. How long ago was all the gaiety of diplo- 
matic social life at Washington! A siren sounded 
shrilly now the cry of danger and death in an 
approaching taube raid. And the greeting ended 
hastily, the hospital commandant and the ambulance 
driver hurrying in the darkness to their respective 
posts of duty. 

The Viscountess has been in charge of a number 
of hospitals, having been transferred from place to 
place at the front. When I saw her, she was tem- 
porarily in command for a few weeks at the hospital 
which had been opened at Claridge's Hotel in Les 
Champs Elysees in Paris. She didn't care about 
her medals or her own magnificent record. It wasn't 
even the achievements of her husband, the Viscount 
D'Azy, in command cf the naval battleship Jaure- 



128 WOMEN WANTED 



->erry, of which she spoke most often. The 
Viscountess D'Azy's one theme is her boy. Before 
the war he was her little son. Now he is a tall and 
handsome officer in uniform, at the age of nineteen, 
Sub-lieutenant Charles Benoit D'Azy. 

He wanted to enlist when she did. But she in- 
sisted that he remain at school until he had finished 
his examinations in the spring of 1915. He got into 
action in time for the great push on the Somme. 
Here at the hospital in Les Champs Elysees the 
Viscountess shows me his photograph, snapshots that 
she has taken with her kodak. Last night she walked 
unattended and alone three miles through the streets 
of Paris at midnight after seeing him off at the Gare 
de l'Est. He had started again for the front after 
his furlough at home. Her one request to the war 
department is to be detailed to hospital duty where 
she may be near her boy's regiment. Her pride in 
the boy is beautiful. When she speaks his name 
that look of experience is gone for the moment, and 
in the eyes of Elizabeth D'Azy there is only the soft 
luminous mother-love, even as it may be reflected 
in your eyes that have never yet seen bloodshed. 

"Up to the time of the war," the Viscountess said 
in her pretty broken English as she looked reminis- 
cently out on the broad avenue of Paris, "I was doing 
nothing but going to fetes all day and dancing most 
of the nights. But I think there is no reason why a 
woman who has danced well should not be able to 
do her duty as well as she did her pleasure. N'est- 



+ 




LADY RALPH PAGET OF ENGLAND 

Descendant of American forefathers. She is a war heroine wor- 
shipped by the entire Serbian nation for her consecrated devotion 
to their people. 



WAR JEWELRY 129 

ce pas?" And from the records of the European 
war offices, I think so, too. 

THE WOMAN WHOM A NATION ADORES 

Among the English war heroines is Lady Ralph 
Paget, whose name has gone round the world for 
her splendid service in Serbia. In that defenceless 
little land, exposed so cruelly to the ravages of this 
terrible war, she commanded with as efficient execu- 
tive skill as any of the generals who have been lead- 
ing armies, one of the best-managed hospitals that 
have faced the enemy's fire. 

Leila Paget had lived all her life in the environ- 
ment where ladies have their breakfast in bed and 
some one does their hair and hands them even so 
much as a pocket-handkerchief. "Leila going to 
command a hospital?" questioned some of her 
friends, "Leila who has always been so dependent 
on her mother?" 

She is the daughter, you see, of the Lady Arthur 
Paget, the beautiful Mary Paran Stevens of New 
York, who, ever since her marriage into the British 
aristocracy, has been one of the leaders in the Buck- 
ingham Palace set. Leila Paget was, of course, 
brought up as is the most carefully shielded and pro- 
tected English girl in high life. She grew up in a 
stately mansion in Belgrave Square. She was intro- 
duced to society in the crowded drawing-room there 
which has been the scene of her brilliant mother's 
so many social triumphs. But she had no ambition 



i 3 o WOMEN WANTED 

to be a social butterfly. She was a debutante who 
did not care for a cotillion. You see, it was not yet 
her hour. She was a tall, rather delicate girl who 
continued to be known as the beautiful Lady Paget's 
"quiet" daughter. A few seasons passed and she 
married her cousin, the British diplomat, Sir Ralph 
Paget, many years her senior. 

She had never known responsibility at all when 
one day she sat down in the great red drawing-room 
in Belgrave Square to make out a list of the staff 
personnel and the supplies that would be required 
for running a war hospital in Serbia. Her heart at 
once turned to this land in its time of trouble because 
she had for three years lived in Serbia when Sir 
Ralph was the British Minister there. They had 
but recently returned to England on his appointment 
as under secretary of foreign affairs. And now she 
had determined to go to the relief of Serbia with a 
hospital unit. I suppose British society has never 
been more surprised and excited about any of the 
women who have done things in this war than they 
were about Leila Paget. This day in the great red 
drawing-room Leila Paget found her metier. She is 
the daughter of a soldier, General Sir Arthur Paget, 
and what has developed as her amazing organising 
and administrative ability is an inheritance from a 
line of American ancestors through her beautiful 
mother. But from her reserved, retiring manner 
none of her friends had suspected that she was of 
the stuff of which heroines are made. Now, as she 
laid her plans for war relief, she did it with an expe- 



WAR JEWELRY 131 

ditious directness and a mastery of detail with which 
some Yankee forefather in Boston might have man- 
aged his business affairs. With a comprehensive 
glance she seemed to see the equipment that would 
be needed. Here in the red drawing-room she sat, 
with long foolscap sheets before her on the antique 
carved writing desk. She listed the requirements, 
item by item, a staff of so many surgeons, so many 
physicians, so many nurses. Then she estimated the 
supplies, so many surgeon's knives, so many bottles 
of quinine, everything from bandages and sheets 
down to the last box of pins. And she planned to 
a pound the quantity of rice and tapioca. Her hos- 
pital ultimately did have jam and tea when all the 
others were scouring Serbia in a frantic search to 
supplement diminishing supplies. Without any 
excitement, with an utter absence of hysteria as a 
woman ordering gowns for a gay season in Mayfair, 
Leila Paget gave her instructions and assembled her 
equipment. It was, you see, her hour. 

She arrived at Uskub in October, 1914, with the 
first English hospital on the scene to stem the tide 
of the frightful conditions that prevailed toward the 
end of 1914. After the retreat of the Austrians, 
Serbia had been left a charnel house of the dead and 
dying. Every large building of any kind — schools, 
inns, stables — was filled with the wounded, among 
whom now raged also typhus, typhoid, and small- 
pox. There were few doctors and no nurses, only 
orderlies who were Austrian prisoners. At one huge 
barracks fifteen hundred cases lay on the cots and 



132 WOMEN WANTED 

under them ; at another three thousand fever patients 
overflowed the building and lay on the ground 
outside in their uniforms, absolutely unattended. 
Facing conditions like these, Lady Paget opened her 
hospital in a former school building. And here in 
the war zone she instituted for herself such a regime 
as probably was never before arranged for an Eng- 
lishwoman of title. 

She arose at four o'clock in the morning, and when 
she slipped from her cot, no one handed her a silk 
kimono. The regulation "germ proof" uniform 
worn by women relief workers in Serbia consisted of 
a white cotton combination affair, the legs of which 
tucked tight into high Serbian boots. Over this 
went an overall tunic with a collar tight about the 
neck and bands tight about the wrists. There was 
a tight-fitting cap to go over the hair. And beneath 
this uniform, about neck and arms, you wore band- 
ages soaked in vaseline and petroleum. It was the 
protection against the attacking vermin that swarmed 
everywhere as thick as common flies. Wounded 
men from the trenches arrived infested with lice, and 
typhus is spread by lice. Lady Paget stood hero- 
ically at her post by their bedsides, with her own 
hands attending to their needs. What there was to 
be done in the way of every personal service, she did 
not shrink from. And she unpacked bales of goods. 
And she scrubbed floors. And she assisted with the 
rites for the dying. There had to be a lighted can- 
dle in a dying Serbian soldier's hand, and often her 
own hand closed firmly about the hand too weak to 



WAR JEWELRY 133 

hold the candle alone. Her wonderful nerve never 
failed, but there came a time when her frail physical 
strength gave out. She still held on, working for 
two days with a high fever temperature before she 
finally succumbed, herself the victim of typhus. 
Her husband was telegraphed for. She was uncon- 
scious when he arrived and it was three or four days 
before he could be permitted to see her. Her life 
hung in the balance for weeks. But finally recov- 
ery began and it was planned for her to return to 
England for convalescence. She and Sir Ralph 
were attended to the railroad station by the military 
governor of Macedonia, the archbishop of the Serb- 
ian Church, and a guard of honour of Serbian officers. 
The Serbian people in their devotion lined the street 
and threw flowers beneath her feet and kissed the 
hem of her dress. At the station the Crown Prince 
presented her with the highest decoration within his 
gift and the Order No. 1 of St. Sava, a cross of dia- 
monds. Never before had it been bestowed on any 
other woman save royalty. Seldom has any woman 
in history been so conspicuously the object of an en- 
tire country's gratitude. The street on which the 
hospital stood was renamed with her name. On the 
Plain of Kossova there stands a very old and historic 
church, on the walls of which from time to time 
through the centuries, have been inscribed the names 
of queens and saints. Leila Paget's name also has 
been written there. A nation feels even as does that 
common Serbian soldier whom she had nursed back 
from death, who afterwards wrote her: "For me 



134 WOMEN WANTED 

only two people exist, you on earth and God in 
Heaven." 

Well, Leila Paget stayed with Serbia to the end. 
After two months' rest in England, she was back in 
July at her hospital in Uskub. Sir Ralph had re- 
turned with her, having been made general director 
of the British medical and relief work in Serbia, with 
his headquarters at Nish. In October the Bulgarians 
took Uskub. When the city was under bombard- 
ment during the battle that preceded its fall, Sir 
Ralph arrived in a motor car to rescue his wife. But 
four hours later he had to leave without her on his 
way in his official capacity to warn the other hos- 
pitals which were in his charge. "Leila, Leila," he 
expostulated in vain. She only shook her head. 
"My place is here," she said, glancing backward 
where 600 wounded soldiers lay. Lady Paget and 
her hospital were of course detained by the enemy 
when they occupied the town. She remained to 
nurse Bulgarians, Austrians and Serbians alike. 
And she organised relief work for the refugees, 
of whom she fed sometimes as many as 4,000 a 
day. For weeks and months, it was only by dint 
of the utmost exertion that it was possible to ex- 
tract from the exhausted town sufficient wood and 
petrol just to keep fires going in the hospital kitchen 
and sterilisers in the operating rooms. "These," 
says Lady Paget, "were strange times and in the 
common struggle for mere existence it did not 
occur very much to any one to consider who were 
friends and who were enemies." In the spring of 






WAR JEWELRY 135 

1916, in March, arrangements were made by the 
German Government permitting the return to Eng- 
land of Lady Paget and her unit. Her war record 
reaching America, the New York City Federation of 
Women's Clubs selected her as the recipient of their 
jewelled medal. It is awarded each year to the 
woman of all the world who has performed the most 
courageous act beyond the call of duty. 

HEROIC SERVICE OF SCOTTISH WOMEN 

Woman's war record in Europe is now starred 
with courageous acts. That day in Serbia Sir 
Ralph, riding on while the people sprinkled their 
mountain roads with white powder in token of sur- 
render, came to the Scottish Women's Hospitals. 
These had not even men doctors, as at Uskub. They 
were "manned" wholly b)' women sent out by the 
National Union of Women Suffragists in Great Brit- 
ain. And there was not a man about the place ex- 
cept the wounded men in the beds. Rut Dr. Alice 
Hutchinson, at Valjevo, and Dr. Elsie Inglis, at 
Krushevats, with their staffs, also refused to leave 
their patients. All three of these women made the 
decision to face the enemy rather than desert their 
posts of duty. They were all three taken prisoners 
and required to nurse the German wounded along 
with their own. Months afterward they were re- 
leased to be returned to England. Dr. Hutchinson, 
who has been decorated by the Serbian Government 
with the order of St. Sava, when she evacuated her 
hospital at the order of the Austrians, wrapped the 



136 WOMEN WANTED 

British flag about her waist beneath her uniform that 
it might not be insulted by the invaders. Dr. Inglis 
had all her hospital equipment confiscated by the 
Germans. When she protested that this was in vio- 
lation of Red Cross rules, the German commander 
only smiled: "You have made your hospital so 
perfect," he said, "we must have it." Dr. Inglis 
has been decorated with the Serbian order of the 
White Eagle. Since then, at the Russian front with 
another Scottish hospital, Dr. Inglis and her entire 
staff have again been decorated by the Russian Gov- 
ernment. 

In London I heard the women of the Scottish hos- 
pitals spoken of at historic St. Margaret's Chapel as 
"that glorious regiment of Great Britain called the 
Scottish Women's Hospitals." And the clergyman 
who said it, spoke reverently in eulogy of one of the 
most distinguished members of that regiment, "the 
very gallant lady who in behalf of her country has 
just laid down her life." In the historic chapel, the 
wall at the back of the altar behind the great gold 
cross was hung with battle-flags. Men in khaki and 
women in khaki listened with bowed heads. It was 
the memorial service for Katherine Mary Harley, of 
whom the London papers of the day before had 
announced in large headlines, "Killed at her post of 
duty in Monastir." 

In that other world we used to have before the 
war, Mrs. Harley was known as one of England's 
most distinguished constitutional suffragists, not 
quite so radical as Mrs. Despard, her sister, who is 




MRS. KATHERiNE M. HARLEY OF LONDON 

One of England's famous suffragists, a number of whom have 
died at the front in their country's cause. Mrs. Harley was 
buried like a soldier with her war decoration on the coat lapel 
of her uniform. 



WAR JEWELRY 137 

the leader of the Woman's Freedom League. One 
of her most notable pieces of work in behalf of votes 
for women was the great demonstration she organised 
a few years ago in that pilgrimage of women who 
marched from all parts of England, addressing vast 
concourses of people along the highways and arriving 
by diverse routes for a great mass meeting in Hyde 
Park. You see, Katherine Harley was an organiser 
of tried capacity. And she, too, comes of a family 
of soldiers. She was the daughter of Captain 
French, of Kent. Her husband, who died from the 
effects of the Boer War, was Colonel Harley, chief 
of staff to General Sir Leslie Rindle in South Africa. 
Her brother is Viscount Sir John French, former 
field marshal of the English forces in France. And 
her son is now fighting at the front. With all of 
this brilliant array of military men belonging to her, 
it is a curious fact, as her friends in London told me, 
that Mrs. Harley did not believe in war. "Kath- 
erine was a pacifist," one of them said at the Inter- 
national Franchise Club the night that the announce- 
ment of her death was received there in a hushed and 
sorrowful silence. "But she believed if there must 
be war, some one must bind up the wounds of war. 
And it was with high patriotic zeal and with the 
fearless spirit of youth, albeit she was 62 years of 
age, that Mrs. Harley in 1914 enlisted with the Scot- 
tish Women, taking her two daughters with her into 
the service. She went out as administrator of the 
hospital at Royaumont. And when that was in suc- 
cessful operation, she was transferred to Troyes to 



138 WOMEN WANTED 

set up the tent hospital there. Then she was called 
to Salonica. It was at Salonica that she commanded 
the famous transport flying column of motor-ambu- 
lances that went over precipitous mountain roads 
right up to the fighting line to get the wounded. 
She was in charge of a motor-ambulance unit with 
the Serbian army at Monastir when in March, 1917, 
at the time of the regular evening bombardment by 
the enemy, she was struck by a shell. They buried 
her like a soldier and she lies at rest with the Croix 
de Guerre for bravery on her breast out there at the 
front of the conflict. 

Violetta Thurston, you might think, if you met 
her, a little English schoolgirl who has just seen Lon- 
don for the first time. Then by her eyes you would 
know that she is more, by the wide, almost startled 
look in what were meant to be calm, peaceful, Eng- 
lish eyes. Violetta Thurston is the little English 
nurse decorated by both Russia and Belgium who in 
these last years has lived a life that thrills with the 
adventures of war. She went out at the head of 
twenty-six nurses from the National Union of 
Trained Nurses who were at work in Brussels when 
the Germans arrived. They improvised their hospi- 
tal in the fire-station. At last the English nurses 
were all expelled by German order and sent to Dun- 
kirk. There Miss Thurston connected with the Rus- 
sian Red Cross. 

She has written a book, "Field Hospital and Fly- 
ing Column," on her experiences in Russia. There 
were four days at Lodz that she neither washed nor 



WAR JEWELRY 139 

had her clothes off. And once she was wounded by- 
shrapnel and once nearly killed by a German bomb. 
The last record I have of her she was matron in 
charge of a hospital at La Panne in Belgium. 

HEROINES OF FRANCE 

No girl has, I suppose, lived a more uneventful 
life than did Emilienne Moreau up to the time that 
she became one of the most celebrated heroines of 
France. You haven't if your home is, say, down in 
some little mining village of West Virginia or in the 
coal-fields of Pennsylvania, where you are going back 
and forth to school on week days and to Sunday 
school every Sunday. Emilienne was like that in 
Loos. She was sixteen and so near the end of school 
that she was about to get out the necessary papers 
for taking the examination for institutrice, which is 
a school-teacher in France. Loos was a mining vil- 
lage. The inhabitants lived in houses painted in the 
bright colours that you always used to see in this 
gay and happy land. It was in one of the most pre- 
tentious houses situated in the Place de la Repub- 
lique, and opposite the church, that the Moreau fam- 
ily lived. The large front room of the house was 
M. Moreau's store. He had worked all his life in 
the mines and now at middle age, only the past 
summer, had removed here with his family from a 
neighbouring village and he had purchased the gen- 
eral store. It was with great pride that the family 
looked forward to an easier life and a comfortable 
career for the father as a "bonneted merchant." 



140 WOMEN WANTED 

Emilienne was his favourite child, his darling and 
his pride, and she in turn adored her father. Often 
they took long walks in the woods together. They 
had just come back from one of these walks, Emi- 
lienne with her arms filled with bluets and marguer- 
ites, when on August l a long shriek of the siren at 
the mines called the miners from the shafts and the 
farmers round about from their fields. Assembling 
at the Mairie for mobilisation all the men of military 
age marched away from Loos. 

That night the sun went down in a blood-red 
glory. All the houses of Loos were bathed in blood- 
red. "Bad sign," muttered an old woman purchas- 
ing chocolate at the store. And it was. Soon the 
refugees from surrounding burning villages came 
flocking by in streams, telling of the terrible Ger- 
mans from whom they had escaped. Most of the 
inhabitants of Loos joined the fleeing throngs. Of 
five thousand people, ultimately only two hundred 
remained in the village. Among these were the 
Moreau family, who, possessing in marked degree 
that national trait of love for their home and their 
belongings, refused to leave. "But," said her fa- 
ther to Emilienne, "little daughter, it will, I fear, 
be a long time before you will gather flowers again." 

And it was. The Germans were in possession of 
Loos by October. They poured petrol on the houses 
and burned many of them. At the store in the Place 
de la Republique, Emilienne, with quick wit, set a 
bottle of wine out on the counter and they drank 
and went away without burning, although they 



WAR JEWELRY 141 

looted the store of everything of value. During the 
year that followed, Loos remained in the hands of the 
enemy. In the effort of the French to retake it, it 
was often fired upon from the surrounding hills. 
From the windows in the sloping garret roof, Emi- 
lienne and her father watched many a battle until 
the bombs began falling on the garret itself. They 
were exposed to constant danger. They had to live 
on the vegetables they could gather from the deserted 
neighbouring gardens. By December her father was 
ill from privation and hunger and anxiety, and one 
night he died. Emilienne, girl as she was, seems to 
have been the main reliance of the family, her 
mother, her little sister Marguerite, and her little 
brother Leonard, aged nine. The morning after her 
father's death, Emilienne went to the German com- 
mandant to ask for assistance. How should she get 
a coffin*? How should it be possible to bury her 
father? And the German laughed: "One can get 
along very well without a coffin!" He finally per- 
mitted her four French prisoners to dig the grave 
and the cure of Loos, he said, could say a prayer. 
But Emilienne was heart-broken at the thought of 
putting her father into the ground without a coffin. 
She and her little brother made one with their own 
hands from boards she found at the deserted car- 
penter-shop down the street. 

By the spring of 1915 the bombardment of Loos 
increased in violence. There were days at a time 
when the whole family, with their black dog Sultan, 
did not dare venture out of the cellar. In Septem- 



142 WOMEN WANTED 

ber, Emilienne, ascending to the demolished garret, 
where she lay flat on her stomach on the rafters, 
watched a battle in which the strangest beings she 
ever saw took part, fantastic creatures of a grey col- 
our who were throwing themselves on the German 
trenches. As they advanced, she noticed that they 
wore "little petticoats," and she hurried to tell her 
mother that these must be the English suffragettes of 
whom she had heard, coming to the rescue of Loos. 
What they actually were was the Scottish troops in 
kilts, the famous "Black Watch," who a few days 
later had driven the Germans from Loos. As they 
came into the village, Emilienne, braving a cyclone 
of shells, and rallying her French neighbours, ran to 
meet them, waving the French flag and singing the 
"Marseillaise." Thus, it is said, by her fearless 
courage, was averted a retreat that might have meant 
disaster along the whole front. 

But the fighting was not yet over. During the 
next few days, Emilienne, with the Red Cross doc- 
tor's assistance, turned her house into a first-aid sta- 
tion. Some seven of the stalwart Scotsmen in the 
"little petticoats," she herself dragged in to safe 
shelter when they had been wounded. Two Ger- 
mans taking aim at French soldiers she killed with 
a revolver she had just snatched from the belt of a 
dead man. When the enemy had been finally re- 
pulsed, Emilienne Moreau was summoned by the 
Government to be given the Croix de Guerre. 

A little later, her pictured face was placarded all 
over Paris by the French newspapers. They wanted 



WAR JEWELRY 143 

her to write her personal story. At first she shrank 
from it : "It would be presumption on the part of a 
girl. W T hat would my commune think?" But 
finally she was prevailed upon, and for two months 
daily "Mes Memoir es" appeared on the front page 
of Le Petit Parisien with a double-column headline. 
Even more honours have come to Emilienne. Great 
Britain bestowed on her its order of St. John of 
Jerusalem and the King has sent her a personal invi- 
tation to visit Buckingham Palace as soon as the 
Channel crossing shall be safe. 

With it all, you would think Emilienne, if you 
met her, quite a normal girl. You see, she is young 
enough to forget. And it is only occasionally that 
in the clear blue eyes you catch a glimpse of tragedy. 
Her smooth brown hair she is as interested in having 
in the latest mode as are you who to-day consulted 
the fashion-pages of a magazine for coiffures. I 
have seen her on the sands at Trouville with a group 
of girls at play at blind man's buff in the moonlight. 
And by her silvery laughter you would not know her 
from the rest as a heroine. The next day, when they 
were in bathing and the body of a drowned man was 
washed ashore, one of the other girls fainted. After- 
ward Emilienne said, and there was in her eyes a 
far-away look of old horrors as she spoke, "Marie, 
Marie, if your eyes had looked on what mine have, 
you would not faint so easily." 

There is another French girl, the youngest war 
heroine I know who has been decorated by any gov- 
ernment. And the case of Madeleine Danau is per- 



144 WOMEN WANTED 

haps of special interest, because any girl in the 
United States can even now begin to be a heroine 
as she was. They say in France that "la petite 
Danau" has served her country even though it was 
not while exposed to shot and shell. She lives in 
the village of Corbeil and she was only fourteen 
years old at the time her father, the baker, was mo- 
bilised. A baker in France, it must be remembered, 
is a most necessary functionary in the community, 
for as everybody has for years bought bread, nobody 
even knows how to make it at home any more. The 
whole neighbouring countryside, therefore, you see, 
was most dependent on the baker, and the baker was 
gone away to war. It was then that Madeleine 
proved equal to doing the duty that was nearest to 
her. She promptly stepped into her father's place 
before the bread-trough and the oven. She gets up 
each morning at four o'clock and with the aid of her 
little brother, a year younger than herself, she makes 
each day eight hundred pounds of bread, which is 
delivered in a cart by another brother and sister. 
The radius of the district is some ten miles, and no 
household since war began has missed its daily sup- 
ply of bread. 

One day Madeleine was summoned to a public 
meeting for which the citizens of Corbeil assembled 
at the Mairie. She went in her champagne-coloured 
dress of toile de laine and her Sunday hat of leghorn 
trimmed with black velvet and white roses. And 
there before this public assemblage the Prefet des 
Deux-Sevres pinned on Madeleine the Cross of Lor- 



WAR JEWELRY 145 

raine and read a letter from President Poincaire of 
France. In it the President presented to Madeleine 
Danau his sincere compliments and begged her to 
accept "this little jewel." this Cross of Lorraine, 
which shall proclaim that the valiant child of the 
Deux-Sevres through her own labour assuring for the 
inhabitants of the Commune of Exoudon their daily 
bread, has performed as patriotic a service and is as 
good a Frenchwoman as are any of her sisters of the 
Meuse. 

The ever-lengthening list of heroic women who 
have distinguished themselves in this war in Europe 
is now so many that it is quite impossible even to 
mention any considerable number of them in less 
than a very large book. You find their names now 
in every country quite casually listed along with 
those of soldiers in the Roll of Honour published in 
the daily newspapers. And it is no surprise to come 
on women's names in any of the lists, "Dead," 
"Wounded," or "Decorated." The French Acad- 
emy out of seventy prizes in 1916 awarded no less 
than forty-seven to women "as most distinguished 
examples of military courage." Among these the 
Croix de Guerre has been given to Madame Mache- 
rez, capable citizeness of Soissons, who has been 
daily at the Mairie in an executive capacity, and to 
Mile. Sellier who has been in charge of the Red 
Cross hospital there during the long months of the 
bombardment. The Cross of the Legion of Honor 
along with the cross of Christ decorates the front of 
the black habit of Sister Julie, the nun of Gerbe* 



146 WOMEN WANTED 

viller who held the invading Germans at bay while 
she stood guard over the wounded French soldiers 
at her improvised hospital. 

It's like this in all of the warring countries. And 
all of these women with their war jewelery for splen- 
did service, are women like you and me. But yes- 
terday, and they might have been pleased with a 
string of beads to wind about a white throat. Out 
of every-day feminine stuff like this shall our war 
heroines too be made. 



CHAPTER V 
The New Wage Envelope 

The baby had been fretful all that hot summer 
day. Every time he was passed over to the eldest 
little girl, he cried. So Mrs. Lewis had to keep 
him herself. All the twenty pounds of him rested 
heavily on her slender left arm while she went about 
the kitchen getting supper. With one hand she 
managed now and then to stir the potatoes "warm- 
ing over" in the pan on the stove. She put the pinch 
of tea in the pot and set it steeping. And she fried 
the ham. She set on the table a loaf of bread, still 
warm from the day's baking and called to the eldest 
little girl to bring the butter. "Aren't we going to 
have the apple sauce too?" the child asked. "Oh, 
yes, bring it," the mother had answered pettishly. 
"I'm that tired I don't care how quickly you eat 
everything up." 

You see she had been going around like this with 
the heavy baby all day while she baked, and there 
were the three meals to cook. And she had done 
some of the ironing and there was the kitchen floor 
that had to be "washed down." And the second 
little girl's dress had to be finished for Sunday. And 
Jimmie, aged nine, whose food was always dis- 
agreeing with him, was in bed with one of his sick 

147 



148 women wanted 

spells and called frequently for her to wait on him 
in the bedroom at the head of the stairs. And she 
had been up with the baby a good deal anyhow the 
night before. So you see why Mrs. Lewis was what 
is called "cross." 

Besides, she was just now facing a new anxiety. 
When her husband came in from the shop and hung 
up his hat and she had dished up the potatoes and 
the family sat down to the evening meal, there was 
just one subject of conversation. The State of New 
York was making its preparedness preparation with 
the military census that was to begin to-morrow, a 
detailed inventory of man power and possessions. 
Hitherto for America the war had been over in Eu- 
rope. Now for the first time it was here for the 
Lewis family. And other similar supper tables all 
over the United States were facing it too. "But you 
couldn't possibly go," the tired woman said across 
the table. 

"I may have to," the man answered. 

"Then what'll happen to me and the children 4 ?" 
she returned desperately. 

And he didn't know. And she didn't know. 
Hardly anybody knew. We on this side of the 
Atlantic are now beginning to find out. 

Mr. Lewis was drafted last week. The rent is 
paid one month ahead. You can see the bottom of 
the coal bin. There's only half a barrel of flour. 
And there are seven children to feed. No, there 
are none of her family nor his that want to adopt 
any of them as war work. Well, there you are. 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 149 

And there Mrs. Lewis is. In her nervous dread of 
the charity that she sees coming, she slaps the chil- 
dren twice as often as she used to and the baby cries 
all day. 

But, Mrs. Lewis, listen. Don't even ask the Ex- 
emption Board to release your husband. It's your 
chance to be a patriot and let him go. And this 
war may not be as bad for you as you think. There 
are women on the other side could tell you. Sup- 
pose, suppose you never had to do another week's 
baking and you were rested enough to love the last 
baby as you did the first, and all the children could 
have shoes when they needed them, and there was 
money enough beside for a new spring hat and the 
right fixings to make you pretty once more. So 
that your man coming back from the front when the 
war is won, may fall in love with you all over again. 
No, it's not heaven I'm talking about. It's here in 
a war-ridden world. This is no fairy tale. It's the 
truth in Britain and France, as it's going to be in the 
United States. 

"Somewhere in England" Mrs. Black, when her 
country took up arms in 1914, was as anxious and 
concerned as you are to-day. Her man was a car- 
cleaner who earned 22 shillings a week on the Great 
Western Railway. That seems appallingly little 
from our point of view. But thousands of British 
working class families were accustomed to living on 
such a wage. The Blacks had to. It is true there 
wasn't much margin for joy in it. And when the call 
to the colours came, it was to Mr. Black an invitation 



150 WOMEN WANTED 

to a Great Adventure. He enlisted. Well, the first 
winter had not passed before it was demonstrated 
that Mrs. Black and the children — there were five of 
them — were not going to experience any new hard- 
ship because of the absence of the head of the fam- 
ily in Flanders. By January she was saying hope- 
fully one morning across the fence to her neighbour 
in the next little smoke-coloured brick house in the 
long dingy row : "If them that's makin' this war'll 
only keep it up long enough, I'll be on my feet 
again." 

To-day you may say that Mrs. Black is "on her 
feet." There are Nottingham lace curtains at her 
front windows as good as any in the whole row of 
Lamson's Walk. The new chest of drawers she's 
needed ever since she was married is a place to put 
the children's clothes. And it's such a help to keep- 
ing the three rooms tidy. Santa Claus came at 
Christmas with a graphophone. And you ought to 
see Mrs. Black's fur coat ! Three other women who 
haven't got theirs yet were in the night she wore it 
home "just to feel the softness of it." Their hands, 
do you know, hands that are hard and grimy with 
England's black town soot, had never so much as 
touched fur before! And they're going to wear it 
soon, if this war keeps up. For they're all of them 
these new women in industry, like Mrs. Black. 

Mrs. Black, to begin with, has her "separation 
allowance" because her husband's at the front. 
That's 12 shillings and sixpence per week for her- 
self, 5 shillings for the first child, three shillings six- 






THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 151 

pence for the second and 2 shillings for each sub- 
sequent child. Well, with the five children, that 
makes 27 shillings a week coming in and there's 
none of it going to the Great Boar's Head on the 
corner, which always used to get a look-in on Mr. 
Black's weekly wage envelope before Mrs. Black 
did. Now, in addition to this 27 shillings a week, 
which in itself is 5 shillings more than the family 
ever had before, Mrs. Black is at the factory where 
she is making 30 shillings a week. That's 57 shill- 
ings a week, which is her household income more 
than doubled. It's why 60,000 fewer persons in 
London were in receipt of poor relief in September, 
1915, than in 1903, the previous most prosperous 
year known to the Board of Trade. In the West 
End of this town titled families are counting their 
"meatless" days. In the East End, families are 
celebrating meat days that were never known before 
the war. The Care Committee used to have to pro- 
vide boots for over 300 school children in this dis- 
trict. This year there was only one family, the 
mother of which was ill, that needed boots ! 

RIGHT THIS WAY, LADIES, INTO INDUSTRY 

Mrs. Lewis, this is the answer to your anxious 
inquiry: it's prosperity that's coming to you. In 
every warring country there are women of the work- 
ing classes who have found it. You are going to be 
mobilised for the army of industry as your husband 
for the other army. Only there is no draft or con- 
scription necessary. The recruiting station is just 



152 WOMEN WANTED 

down the street at the factory that recently hung 
out that sign bright with new paint, "Women 
Wanted." See them arriving at the entrance gate. 
Fall in line, Mrs. Lewis, and get measured for your 
new uniform. Yes, you are to have one. It's some 
form of the things they call trousers. But I'm sure 
you won't mind that. Put it on. Put it on quickly. 
In it you will find yourself the real new woman whose 
coming has hitherto been only proclaimed or prophe- 
sied on the waving banners of suffrage processions 
you've watched parading on the avenues. You are 
She for whom the ages have waited. This new 
garment they are handing you has the pocket in it 
for a pay envelope. You who have been toiling 
for your board and the clothes you could get after 
the rest of the family had theirs, are now a labourer 
worthy of hire. Economic independence, the polit- 
ical economists call it, as they take their pen in hand 
to make note of the long lines of you going into in- 
dustry, later to write their deductions into scientific 
treatises about you. 

Now, it may not particularly interest you that you 
are like this, a phenomenon of the 20th century, 
but there are plainer terms that I am sure you will 
understand. Listen, Mrs. Lewis: Every Saturday 
night there is going to be money in your own pocket. 
The convenience of this is that never again will you 
under any circumstances have to go through any 
one's else pockets for it. Do you see 4 ? Right across 
those portals there where they want you so much 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 153 

that every obstacle that used to be piled in your 
pathway has been so surreptitiously carted away 
overnight, that you would hardly believe it ever 
was there, lie all promised opportunities. Susan B. 
Anthony pioneered for them. Mrs. Pankhurst 
smashed windows for them. Mrs. Catt is even now 
politically campaigning for them. And you, Mrs. 
Lewis, are to enter in. What will happen to you 
when you've joined up with the new woman move- 
ment? 

Let us look at the advance columns over on the 
other side. No one met them with : "Woman, back 
to your kitchen!" Or, "This is unscriptural and 
your habits of marriage and maternity will interfere 
with shop routine." 

It was one of the most significant decisions of all 
time since the day of the Cave Woman, that morn- 
ing when Mrs. Black got her aunt to come in to look 
after the children and, hanging up her gingham 
apron, walked out of the kitchen. Women were 
doing it all over Europe. They are to be counted 
now by the hundreds of thousands. Altogether we 
know that they number in the millions although we 
have not the exact returns from every country. By 
1916 England had enrolled in industry 4,086,000 
women and Germany 4,793,472 of whom 866,000 
in England and 1,387,318 in Germany had never 
before been gainfully employed outside their own 
homes. France, Italy, Russia all have similar bat- 
talions. And the important fact is that these new 



154 



WOMEN WANTED 



recruits are going into industry differently. Women 
before had to push their way in. Women now are 
invited in. 

Heretofore there were all the reasons in the world 
why a woman should not work outside her own home. 
Three generations of employment had not yet sufficed 
to efface the impression from the minds even of most 
young girls themselves who went out to earn their 
living that it was only a temporary expedient until 
they could marry and be supported ever after. 
Even when they discovered after marriage that they 
were still earning their own living just as much in 
their husband's kitchen as anywhere they had been 
before, public opinion and the neighbours disap- 
proved of their working for any one outside their 
own family. Who, Madam, would sew on your 
husband's buttons? So strong was this sentiment 
that it even threatened to crystallise on the statute 
books. There were districts in Germany and in the 
North of England where they talked about passing 
a law against the employment of the married woman. 
Then fortunately about this time the world came to 
1914 and the revolution of all established thought. 

Everybody sees now a reason why Mrs. Black 
should work. Her country wants her to. And it 
has swept aside to the scrapheap of ancient prejudice 
all the other reasons against the industrial employ- 
ment of women. Among the rest, the most material 
reason, the most real reason of all, that woman's 
place was the home and every other place was man's. 
That was true. And it was one of the most incon- 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 155 

trovertible facts that each woman who sought em- 
ployment came up against. Industry had never 
been arranged for her needs or her convenience. 

MAKING INDUSTRY OVER FOR HER 

Now it's being made over, actually made over! 
Already woman wins this victory in the Great War. 
Don't we all of us know industries where there 
hasn't been so much as a nail to hang a woman's 
hat on, where it wouldn't be spoiled, let alone a room 
in which she could wash her hands, or change her 
working clothes'? But go through Europe now and 
you will scarcely find any place they haven't tried 
the best they could to fix up for woman's occupancy. 
She shall have the nicest hook that they can find to 
hang her hat on. She shall have a whole cupboard, 
a locker to keep it in, if she'll only put it there to- 
day. And oh, ladies, all of you listen, there's even 
a mirror to see if it's on straight ! Just a little while 
ago I stood in a factory "somewhere in France,' ' 
where they had built a beautiful retiring room with 
lavatories and hot and cold water and a row of shin- 
ing white enamelled sinks. And one day of course 
some thoughtful woman had brought in her hand- 
bag a piece from her cracked looking-glass and fas- 
tened it on the wall between two tacks, you know 
the way you would 4 ? A little later, the superin- 
tendent of the factory saw it there: "I sent right 
out," he told me himself with feeling, "and bought 
this one." And he showed me with pride the full 
length plate-glass mirror that hung on the wall 



156 WOMEN WANTED 

where the little old cracked looking-glass used to be. 
I think every government in Europe now has mir- 
rors listed among "necessary supplies." I mention 
it as significant of the anxious effort to please the 
feminine fancy. 

But the first most important thing that was done 
in making over industry, was opening the door from 
the inside for Mrs. Black's arrival. Every door- 
keeper to-day has his instructions from higher up 
not to keep the lady knocking out in the cold. Her 
coming was in the first instance heralded in England, 
actually heralded with a flourish of trumpets. That 
procession of 40,000 women that Mrs. Pankhurst 
led down the Strand into industry, under the new 
standard, "For Men Must Fight and Women Must 
Work," had flags flying and bands playing. And 
the English Government paid for the bands. Par- 
liament records show that this Suffrage procession 
was financed to the extent of 3,000 pounds, which 
is $15,000. Has there ever been a more revolu- 
tionary conversion than this to the Woman's Cause'? 
For the first time in history, the woman movement 
is underwritten by Government. It is with this sup- 
port that it's going strong all over the world to-day. 

The place that is being made for Mrs. Black and 
her contemporaries is everywhere in the first in- 
stance at least, being arranged through Government 
intervention. With every new push on the front, 
the soldiers that go down in the awful battalions of 
death have to be replaced by others, which means 
that more and more men must be "combed out" of 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 157 

the shops back home. And to employers govern- 
ments have said: Hire women in their places. 

To this employers answered as they have so many 
times to us when we have asked to be hired : "But 
women don't know how." 

You see, it has always been so difficult for us to 
learn. From the bricklayers and the printers up to 
the medical men and the lawyers and the ministers, 
there has always been that gentlemen's agreement in 
every trade: "Don't let her in. And if she gets 
in, don't let her up, any higher up than you have to." 

But now over all the world, to every industry 
that shows a slackening in production, there is issued 
one common government General Order: "Teach 
the Women." And the employer looks question- 
ingly toward the work-bench at the figure in the 
leather apron there, who in some of the most highly 
skilled trades, has always threatened to take off that 
apron and walk out of the shop when a petticoat 
crossed the threshold. There are shops in which 
there has never been a woman apprentice, because he 
wouldn't teach her. Would he now? 

The skilled workman was summoned in England 
to the Home Office for a heart-to-heart talk with 
the Government. He came from the cotton trade, 
the woollen and the worsted trade, the bleachers and 
dyers' trade, the woodworkers and furnishers' trade, 
the biscuit trade, the boot and shoe trade, the en- 
gineering trade and a great many others. The Gov- 
ernment spoke sternly of its power under martial 
law. The skilled workman, shifting his cap from 



158 WOMEN WANTED 

one hand to the other, began to understand. But 
he still stubbornly protested: "Women haven't the 
mental capacity for my work." 

"We shall see," said Government. 

"But it will take so long to learn my trade, five 
years, six years, seven years." 

"Ah, so it will. Very well, then, teach the women 
a part of your trade at a time, a process in which 
instruction can be given in the shortest length of 
time." 

"But the tools of my trade, they are heavy for a 
woman's hands." 

"There shall be special tools made." 

And there have been. So, the now famous "dilu- 
tion" of labour has been arranged. Mrs. Black is 
"in munitions." I saw her standing at a machine 
that is called a capstan lathe, drilling the opening 
in a circular piece of brass. There used to be em- 
ployed in this shop, 1,500 men and the man power 
has been now so diluted, that there are 200 men 
and 1,300 women. There are rows and rows of the 
capstan lathes and down each alleyway, as the space 
between them is called, there are lines of women 
like Mrs. Black. They have to start the machine, 
to feed it, and control it, and stop it. In three 
weeks' time most of them were able to learn these 
repetitive operations. But they do not yet know 
how to take the machine apart or to fix it if anything 
breaks. So up and down each row there goes a 
skilled man who is still retained for this, a "setter- 
up," he is called in the trade. And to supervise 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 159 

each section there is a foreman. It was the fore- 
man who called my attention to the machines. 
'They are," he said, "small lathes, specially adapted 
to the women. We had them made in America since 
the war." 

EASY ENOUGH TO ARRANGE 

Like that you see, it is done. Sometimes to make 
over the job for the woman, there was necessary 
only the simplest expedient like adding the "flap" 
seat in the Manchester tram-cars for the woman- 
conductor to rest between rush hours. Even in 
skilled trades it hasn't always been necessary to 
remodel an entire machine. Sometimes only a lever 
has to be shortened. Sometimes it has been done by 
the addition of "jigs and fixtures," so that a process 
formerly involving judgment and experience, is now 
automatically performed at a touch from the oper- 
ator. Are there heavy weights to be lifted? The 
paper factories met the situation by reducing the 
size of the parcel. The leather, tanning and curry- 
ing trade put in special lifting tackle. The chem- 
ical industries have trucks for transporting the 
heavy carboys. The pottery and brick trades have 
trolleys. And the engineering trade, for manipu- 
lating the heavy shells, has put in electrical cranes 
and carriages: they are operated by a woman who 
sits in a sort of easy chair from which she only 
lifts her hand to touch the right lever. 

These and other innovations have been made in 
accordance with a definite plan. You should hear 



160 WOMEN WANTED 

it just the way a government says it: "In consid- 
ering the physical capacity of a woman factory 
worker," the Home Office directs, "it should be re- 
membered that her body is physiologically different 
from and less strongly built than that of a man. 
It is desirable that the lifting and carrying of heavy 
weights and all sudden violent or physically un- 
suitable movements in the operation of machines 
should so far as practicable be avoided. Often a 
simple appliance or the alteration of a movement 
modifies an objectionable feature when it does not 
altogether remove it. When standing is absolutely 
unavoidable, the hours and spells of employment 
should be proportionately short, and seats should be 
available for use during the brief pauses that occa- 
sionally occur while waiting for material or the ad- 
justment of a tool." 

There is one further instruction: "The introduc- 
tion of women into factories where men only have 
hitherto been employed will necessitate some rear- 
rangement in the way of special attention to the 
fencing of belts, pulleys and machine tools." 

Well, there are now some ninety-six trades and 
some 1,701 processes in which the workshop has 
been gotten ready like this, and woman labour has 
beeen introduced. You see how easily it has all 
been brought about now, when every one, instead of 
putting their heads together on How can we keep 
the women out, is planning eagerly, How can we get 
the women in. 

And do you know that Mrs. Black cannot so much 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 161 

as have a headache to-morrow morning, without the 
English Government being sorry about it? Every 
industry in the land has received its envelope, black- 
lettered, "On His Majesty's Business" and inside 
this note: "Care on the part of employers to secure 
the welfare of women brought in to take the place 
of men in the present emergency will greatly in- 
crease the probability of their employment proving 
successful." A nation, you see, is interested in 
Mrs. Black's success. "Who works fights," an- 
nounced the Government when it invited Mrs. Black 
into industry. The badge, a triangle of brass, that 
she wears on the front of her khaki tunic, is in- 
scribed "On War Service." The French women in 
the munitions factories wear on their left sleeve an 
armlet with an embroidered insignia, a bursting 
bomb, which says the same thing. 

Mrs. Black, I believe as a matter of fact, did have 
a headache one morning. And her output of muni- 
tions fell off. Now that must not happen. For the 
lack of the shells, you know, a battle might be lost. 
The headache was investigated by the Factory In- 
spector. And the Government made a great dis- 
covery, I think we may say as important to us, to 
every woman who works, as was Watt's discovery 
of the principle of the steam-engine that day he 
watched the tea-kettle. This was what the factory- 
inspector found out: Last night after Mrs. Black 
left the shop, there was the dinner to cook, and it 
was eight o'clock before she could get it ready. 
Then, of course, there were the dishes to wash. 



\ 



162 WOMEN WANTED 

Then she swept all her house through. Then she 
put the clothes to soak in the tub over night. Then 
she worked on the stockings in the piled-up mending 
basket until midnight. Then she went to bed, so 
that she could be awake next morning at four o'clock. 
And in the morning she built a fire under the "cop- 
per" and heated the water and washed the clothes 
and boiled them and hung them out on the line. 
And Mrs. Black, having already done a woman's 
work before dawn, went out to fill in the rest of 
the day at a man's work ! 

BEYOND THE PHYSICAL ENDURANCE OF MEN 

This, you should remember, was the woman whom 
the government had hesitated about asking to work 
"overtime" on war orders. Would it be possible to 
extend labour's eight-hour day, they had asked. The 
Trade Unions, when asked, had said it would be a 
great tax on the physique of men. It was more 
than they were equal to under ordinary circum- 
stances. But, well, as an emergency measure, and 
for the duration of the war only, Union rules would 
be suspended to permit of overtime. But even then 
the Government decided on the eight-hour limit for 
women, in exceptional circumstances permitting 
twelve hours. But an employer working women 
longer should be liable to arrest ! 

Then came the Factory Inspector's report laid 
before the Home Office: Mrs. Black was working 
a 20-hour day ! Her case was not at all unique. 
"Overtime" on home work is, of course, what the 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 163 

great majority of women who have gotten into in- 
dustry in the past or into a profession or a career, 
have been accustomed to. Only nobody ever no- 
ticed it before! 

Now every War Office saw it as early as the first 
year of the war: No woman could do a woman's 
work in the home and a man's work in the shop and 
maintain the maximum output. The efficiency ex- 
perts were summoned all over Europe. They were 
shocked at such uneconomic management. Could 
you expect any competent workingman to cook his 
own dinner? There'd be a strike if you did. Why 
in thunder, then, should Mrs. Black be expected to 
cook hers? And every nation hurried to set up in 
its factories the industrial canteen, where meals are 
prepared and served to employes at cost price. 

At one of these industrial canteens at a factory 
in the suburbs of Paris, I sat down to dinner with 
600 working people. The chef, who had shown me 
with pride through his great store-rooms of supplies, 
apologised for the day's menu : He was humiliated 
that there would be neither rabbits nor chicken, but 
with a war-market one did the best they could. The 
a la carte bill of fare proceeded from hors d'ceuvres 
through entrees and roasts to salads and to dessert 
and cheese, and there was wine on every table. You 
selected, of course, what you wished to pay for. 
Marie, on my right, I noticed, paid for her dinner, 
l franc fifty. Jacques, on my left, I saw hand the 
waiter 1 franc seventy-five. My check came to two 
francs. It was a better dinner than I was accus- 



164 WOMEN WANTED 

tomed to for three times the money at the Hotel 
Regina in the Rue de Rivoli. In England at the 
great Woolwich Arsenal, Mrs. Black gets meat and 
two vegetables for eightpence, which is 16 cents, 
and dessert for 2^4 pence which is 5 cents. For an 
expenditure not to exceed 25 pence which is 50 
cents, you can get at any of the industrial canteens 
in England, the four meals for the day for which 
the following is a sample menu : 

Cost in Pence 
Breakfast: Bacon, 3 rashers 4 

Bread, 3 slices, butter and jam 2 

Tomato 34 

Sugar y i0 

Milk y 2 

Dinner: Roast beef 4 

Yorkshire pudding 1% 
Potatoes % 

Cabbage 1 

Apple pie and custard 1^ 

Baked plum pudding 1 

Tea: 2 slices bread, butter and jam 2*A 

Cake y 2 

Sugar y i0 

Milk y 2 

Jam tarts 1 

Supper: 2 slices bread 2 

Cheese 1 

Meat 2 

Pickles Y 2 

Tea, coffee, cocoa, or milk with above "J4 -1 % 

What's happened from Mrs. Black's headache is 
like a tale from the "Arabian Nights." A magic 
wand has been waved over the factory. "It should 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 165 

be made," a Frenchman told me in his enthusiasm, 
"a little Paradise for woman." And that seems to 
be the way they're feeling everywhere. Government 
solicitude in England for the new woman in indus- 
try resulted in 1916 in a new act for the statute 
books under which the Home Office is given wide 
powers to arrange for her comfort. The scientists 
of a kingdom have been engaged to study "Woman." 
Their observations and deductions are every little 
while embodied in a "white paper." There have 
been some fourteen of these "white papers" through 
which the discoveries are disseminated to the fac- 
tories. 

There is a staff of great chemists in government 
laboratories who arrange the menus just mentioned, 
which are really formulas for efficiency. Fat, pro- 
tein and carbohydrates have been carefully propor- 
tioned to produce the requisite calories of energy 
for a maximum output. They emphasise the impor- 
tance of the canteen with this announcement : "For 
a large class of workers, home meals are hurried and, 
especially for women, too often consist of white 
bread and boiled tea. Probably much broken time 
and illness result from this cause." 

There is a staff of competent architects who were 
first called in that there might be provided a place 
in which to eat the carefully prepared meals. "En- 
vironment," it is announced, "has a distinct effect 
on digestion." So a White Paper submitted dia- 
grams for the canteen building. "The site," it said, 
"should have a pleasant, open outlook and a south- 



166 WOMEN WANTED 

ern aspect. The interior should present a clean and 
cheerful appearance. The colour scheme may be in 
pink, duck's egg green or primrose grey." Esti- 
mates are furnished. A dining-room to be built on 
the basis of 8.5 square feet of space per person may 
be erected at a cost not to exceed 7 pounds per place. 
Table and cookery equipment can be installed at a 
rate for 1,000 employes of 30 shillings, 500 em- 
ployes 32 shillings, and 100 employes 47 shillings 
per head. 

And well, you know how it is when you put so 
much as a back porch on the house. You sometimes 
get so interested in improving, that you can't stop. 
Often you remodel the whole house. Well, the fac- 
tory had to keep up with the new dining-room. 
The White Papers began to say that the workroom 
windows had better be washed, and the ceilings 
whitewashed and for artificial lighting, shaded arc- 
lights were recommended. "The question of light- 
ing," the report reads, "is of special importance, now 
that women are employed in large numbers. Bad 
lighting affects the output unfavourably, not only 
by making good and rapid work more difficult, but 
by causing eye-strain." 

The doctors were now being assembled and soon 
a White Paper admonished : "The effective mainte- 
nance of ventilation is a matter of increasing im- 
portance, because of the large number of women 
employed, and women are especially susceptible to 
the effects of defective ventilation." 

Plumbing came next with a White Paper that 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 167 

went exhaustively into the subject of lavatory equip- 
ment, with illustrations showing the best fittings: 
"Fundamental requirements are a plentiful supply 
of hot and cold water, soap, nail brushes, and for 
each worker an individual towel at least 2 feet 
square, to be renewed daily. If shower-baths are 
installed, it must be recognised that for women the 
ordinary shower-bath is not applicable because of 
the difficulty of keeping her long hair dry or of 
drying it after bathing. A horizontal spray, fixed 
at the level of the shoulders will overcome this ob- 
jection." 

EVERY ATTENTION FOR THE WOMAN WHO WORKS 

All of this reconstruction was rapidly going on 
when one day it rained and Mrs. Black got her feet 
wet going to work in the morning. And she was at 
home in bed for two days away from the lathe. 
Fortunately the carpenters were still around. 
" There must be cloak-rooms," came the hurried or- 
der in a White Paper. "They should afford facili- 
ties for changing clothing and boots and for drying 
wet outdoor clothes in bad weather. Each peg or 
locker should bear the worker's name or work-num- 
ber. The cloak-rooms should be kept ver)^ clean." 

And really now, a woman's health is a serious 
matter! Every safeguard must be adopted for its 
protection. If Mrs. Black is indisposed, it is too 
bad for her to have to go all the way home to go to 
bed. Immediate attention might prevent a serious 
illness. Why was it never thought of before? Of 



168 WOMEN WANTED 

course, there should be a doctor always around at 
the works. So the building plans were enlarged to 
include a hospital. The largest building-plans I 
know of have been worked out by one English fac- 
tory that recently put up a whole village of wooden 
houses for women employes, 700 of whom are pro- 
vided with board and lodging at 14 shillings a week. 
There is a public hall, a club, a chapel, a restaurant 
and a hospital. Many factories now have the 
"hostel" for lodging women employes who come 
from a distance. The hospital you will find now at 
any factory of good economic standing, and the doc- 
tor and the trained nurse and the "welfare super- 
visor." The Government directs : "At every work- 
shop where 2,000 persons are employed, there shall 
be at least one whole-time medical officer and at 
least one additional medical officer, if the number 
exceeds 2,000. A woman welfare supervisor shall 
be appointed at all factories and workshops where 
women are employed." 

So now Mrs. Black is given a careful medical ex- 
amination when she first presents herself for em- 
ployment. After that, she is looked over at regu- 
lar intervals. At any time, if she so much as 
appears pale, the doctor is right there to take her 
pulse. Any little thing that may be the matter 
with her is reported at once on the "sickness regis- 
ter." A Health of Munition Workers Committee, 
appointed by Mr. Lloyd George with the concur- 
rence of the Home Office has directed, "Week by 
week the management should scrutinise their chart 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 169 

of sickness returns and study their rise and fall." 
Also any factory employing over 20 women is re- 
quired at regular intervals to fill out a questionnaire 
concerning the environment and conditions of its 
employes, and this record is kept on file at the Home 
Office. 

You see how scientifically the woman in industry 
is handled'? Why, if the munitions output fell off 
this afternoon, the whole English Parliament might 
rise to demand Mrs. Black's health record to-morrow 
morning. 

Mrs. Black must not be allowed to be ill! She 
ought not even to be permitted to get tired ! Gen- 
tlemen, pass her a cup of cocoa or hot milk in the 
morning at half past ten. It is a government order 
which is obligatory for factories where she is em- 
ployed on specially fatiguing processes. At about 
four in the afternoon, she should pause for rest and 
a cup of tea. If she is engaged on a rush order, the 
tea may be passed to her in the workroom. But it 
is most advisable that she go to the canteen for it 
and have a brief period of inactivity in an easy chair 
in the adjoining rest room. This isn't fiction. This 
is industrial fact for women to-day. And there is 
more. The Health of Munition Workers Commit- 
tee are now strongly of the opinion that for women 
and girls a portion of Saturday and the whole of 
Sunday should be available for rest. That Sabbath 
day commandment, it is discovered, isn't only writ- 
ten in the Bible. It is indelibly recorded in the hu- 
man constitution. Even if you keep at toil for 



i 7 o WOMEN WANTED 

seven days, you are able to produce only a six-days' 
output. Except for extraordinary, sudden emer- 
gencies, "overtime" is a most wasteful expedient. 
"The effect of all overtime should be carefully 
watched and workers should be at once relieved from 
it when fatigue becomes apparent." Recently in a 
"General Order" for the hosiery trade, a condition 
is included "that every fourth week must be kept 
entirely free from overtime." A White Paper says : 
"The result of fatigue which advances beyond physi- 
ological limits ('overstrain') not only reduces ca- 
pacity at the moment, but does damage of a more 
permanent kind which will affect capacity for periods 
far beyond the next normal period of rest. It will 
plainly be uneconomical to allow this damage to be 
done." 

Oh, Mrs. Lewis, you can see that something has 
happened, that there's an entirely new sort of place 
in industry for woman on the other side, as there's 
going to be here. In France the gallant government 
almost sees her home from work, at least they make 
sure of her safety in getting there. When the em- 
ployes of a factory live at a distance involving a 
journey to and from work by trolley or train, it is 
permitted for the women to arrive fifteen minutes 
later in the morning and to stop work at night fif- 
teen minutes earlier than the men. Thus they avoid 
the rush hour and the congestion on the trains. 

It was in a factory on the banks of the Seine that 
I noticed another thoughtful attention. There were 
hundreds of women engaged in making munitions 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 171 

and on the work bench before each operator in a 
brass fuse filled with water to serve as a vase, was 
a flower, fresh and fragrant! Great beautiful La 
France roses, splendid roses de gloire, bride roses and 
spicy carnations made lanes of bloom up and down 
the workroom. I turned to the foreman: "Is it 
some fete day?" He shook his head: "The 
flowers are renewed each morning. We do it every 
day. Because the women like it." 

In England one of the important duties assigned 
the Welfare Supervisor is to teach the employes to 
play : "Familiarise the working woman with meth- 
ods of recreation hitherto unknown to her," the in- 
structions read. So they have organised for her 
dramatic entertainments and choral classes and they 
are even teaching her to dance. One factory re- 
cently announced: "We have decided to erect a 
large theatre as a cinema and concert hall." Really, 
Alice in Wonderland met with no more amazing 
surprises than has Mrs. Black. 

And to make sure that she misses nothing that is 
coming to her, the Home Office arranged its "follow- 
up" system. A large staff of women inspectors are 
travelling up and down England stopping at the 
factories. In 1915 alone, they made 13,445 visits- 
Is there anything more the working lady needs'? the 
Government always inquires when the woman fac- 
tory inspector returns from a trip. And it was the 
woman factory inspector who brought word early in 
the war, "Why, yes, the lady should have a new 
dress." 



172 WOMEN WANTED 

EVEN THEY DESIGN HER CLOTHES 

So the Ministry of Munitions took the matter up 
and summoned the designers. As the result, the 
most charming "creation" was adapted from the 
vaudeville stage for industry. The girl "lift" con- 
ductors at Selfridge's Store in London are the pret- 
tiest things you will find out of a chorus. Theirs 
are called, I believe, "peg top" breeches, and there 
is a semi-fitted coat, the whole uniform in mauve 
and beautifully tailored. Well, the Government has 
issued a variety of patterns, some of course, for a 
much less expensive outfit than this. There is one 
uniform that costs not more than 4 shillings: some- 
times the firm even furnishes it and launders it. 
The costume it is most desired to introduce is the 
khaki trousers with the tunic and a round cap, be- 
cause it is really a protection for the workers against 
the revolving machinery. Factories not yet quite 
ready for the whole innovation, begin with the tunic 
and a cap and a skirt. But when you have con- 
vinced Mrs. Black how well she is going to look in 
the other things, she's ready to put them on. 

The situation adjusts itself. This report has been 
made on it to the Government. I quote verbatim 
from the published Proceedings of Parliament and 
a member's speech : "The Ministry has spent a very 
considerable amount of time in going into this mat- 
ter. It would seem to us as men a simple thing. 
But at any rate now from all I have heard, they 
appear to have solved the difficulties. The women's 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 173 

uniforms up and down the country vary, of course, 
according to the duties they have to perform, but 
they must strike all who have observed them not 
only as useful and comely, but also as reflecting 
credit on the fatherly care which the Parliamentary 
Secretary for the Ministry of Munitions has exer- 
cised over the many thousands of the daughters of 
Eve who look to him as their protector." 

Daughters of Eve in your country's service, is 
there anything more that you require 4 ? Yes, one 
thing more: Parliament, please hold the baby! 
It was a response returned from Northumberland to 
Wales. Every government summoning its women 
in industry has sooner or later faced the request. 
There were lines of women applying for Poor Re- 
lief. But why not go to work, the authorities would 
ask. And the child in her arms was the woman's 
answer. Not every woman like Mrs. Black had a 
maiden aunt who could be hired to take care of the 
children. So it happened that, figuratively speak- 
ing, the baby was passed to Parliament. Those gen- 
tlemen, exclaiming "Goodness gracious!" hastily 
looked about for a place to lay it down. 

And the public creche has been promptly erected. 
Sometimes it's done by philanthropy, sometimes by 
the factory, and sometimes at public expense. 
"We'll pay for it," says perspiring Parliament, "only 
hurry!" And they have hurried all over Europe. 
The baby of a reigning monarch is scarcely more sci- 
entifically cared for to-day than is the working wom- 
an's baby. 



i 7 4 WOMEN WANTED 

Industry has been made over to adapt it to ma- 
ternity ! A baby used to be the crowning reason of 
all against woman's industrial employment. Even 
if you didn't have one, you might have. And they 
were very likely to tell you they couldn't bother to 
have you around. If you did succeed in getting 
employment, some committee was sure to go "inves- 
tigating" while you were away from home, and 
they'd report that your parlour was dusty and that 
your children had a dirty face. You tried to tell 
the sociologists, of course, that it wasn't so bad for 
children to have a dirty face as a hungry one, and 
you'd wash them on Sunday. But no one would 
understand and you never could adequately explain. 
Now you don't have to any more. 

Every facility for first aid for the housekeeping 
the woman in industry has left behind her, is being 
arranged. They have bought a few more cups and 
plates and it has been found that the meals at public 
schools that used to be for poor children can just as 
well be for everybody's children. It's a great help 
to the maiden aunt. And if you haven't one, and 
you feel that you must go home to dust the parlour 
or to see that little Mary puts her rubbers on when 
she's out to play, why that can be arranged. The 
London Board of Trade, in a special pamphlet on 
"The Substitution of Women in Industry," pointed 
the way to all nations with this paragraph: "The 
supply of women can be frequently increased by 
adaptation of the conditions of employment to local 
circumstances. For example, one large mill in a 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 175 

certain district where ordinary factory operatives 
were scarce, obtained many married women by ar- 
ranging the hours of work to suit household exigen- 
cies. In one department these hours were from 10 
a. m. to 5 p. m., while another branch was kept go- 
ing by two shifts of women, one set working from 
7 a. m. to midday, and the other from 1 p. m. to 
6 p. m." Also a memorandum from the Health of 
Munition Workers' Committee says: "It is the ex- 
perience of managers that concessions to married 
women such as half an hour's grace on leaving and 
arriving, or occasional 'time off' is not injurious to 
output, as the lost time is made good by increased 
activity." 

EXPERT AT HER JOB 

You see now, there is practically no reason left 
why a woman shouldn't work outside her home if she 
wants to. Such a nice place has been made for her 
in industry, and she's getting along so well. Let's 
take the British Government's word for it. The 
Adjutant General to the Forces in the report on 
"Women's War Work in Maintaining the Industries 
and Export Trade of the United Kingdom" an- 
nounces, "Women have shown themselves capable of 
successfully replacing the stronger sex in practically 
every calling." 

It was before the war that the great feminist, Olive 
Shreiner, wrote her book which has been called the 
Bible of the woman movement. In it occurs a 
memorable statement: "We claim all labour for 



176 WOMEN WANTED 

our field." Now it is our field. Women to-day are 
working as longshoremen, as navvies harrowing coke, 
as railway porters and conductors and ticket takers, 
as postal employes and elevator operators, as brick- 
settlers' labourers, attenders in roller mills, workers 
in 78 processes of boot and shoe-making, in breweries 
filling beer casks and digging and spreading barley, 
in 19 processes in grain milling, in 53 processes in 
paper making, in 24 processes in furniture making, in 
boiler making, laboratory work, optical work, aero- 
plane building, in dyeing, bleaching and printing 
cotton, in woollen and velvet goods, in making brick, 
glazed and unglazed wear, stoneware, tiles, glass, 
leather goods and linoleum. In France a year before 
the war, it happened in the baking trade that a com- 
mittee appointed to take under advisement the ques- 
tion of admitting women reported adversely that 
the trade was not "adapted" to women. To-day 
there are 2000 women bakers in France. In all 
countries the largest number of women are employed 
in two occupations, in agriculture and in munitions. 
England had last spring 150,000 women at work in 
the fields and was in process of enrolling 100,000 
more. In munitions the last returns show England 
with 400,000, Germany with 500,000 and France 
with 400,000 women. 

In this the engineering trade, women have mas- 
tered already 500 processes, three-fourths of which 
had never known the touch of a woman's hand before 
the war. "I consider myself a first class workman at 
my trade. It took me seven years to learn it," said 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 177 

a foreman to me through the crashing noise of the 
machines among which we stood, "but," and he 
waved his hand over his domain in which 1700 
women were at work, "these women, at occupations 
requiring speed and dexterity, already excel me." 

He led me to the side of a girl who was drilling 
holes in brass. "See," he said, "she does 1000 holes 
at 50 centimes an hour. No man we were ever able 
to employ, ever did more than 500 holes an hour, 
and we had to pay him 75 centimes." 

We came to the gauging department: "Here," 
he said, "women are more expert than men. See 
how well adapted to the task are their slender, supple 
fingers? And they work for 50 centimes an hour, 
where we should have to pay men 80." 

Like this the evidence of woman's efficiency at the 
work they are doing, is everywhere in Europe. It 
has now been written into the records that cannot 
be gainsaid. That famous publication, Women's 
War Work, in announcing the 1701 jobs at which 
a woman can be employed, asserts under the authority 
of the British War Office that at all of these jobs 
a woman is "just as good as a man, and for some 
of them she is better." Then they sent a special 
commission over to see what women were accom- 
plishing in French factories. After a conference 
with M. Albert Thomas, the French Minister of 
Munitions, and a wide tour of inspection, the special 
commission returned to England with this report: 
"The opinion in the French factories is that the out- 
put of females on small work equals and in some 



178 WOMEN WANTED 

cases excels that of men. And in the case of heavier 
work, women are of practically the same value as 
men, within certain limits (when machinery is intro- 
duced to supplement their muscular limitations)." 
Italy also presents its evidence. The Bolettino deW 
officio del Lavoro, Journal of the Italian Labour De- 
partment, under date of October 16, 1916, had this 
to say: "It is necessary to remove the obstacles to 
the larger employment of women. As soon as man- 
ufacturers show plenty of initiative and adaptive- 
ness for this new class of labour, and cease to cherish 
preconceived opinions as to the inferiority of wo- 
man's work and as to the low wages it merits, the 
labour of women will respond splendidly to the ut- 
most variety of demands." 

Apparently one controversy is now at rest : Wo- 
man knows enough for all of these things that she 
has been permitted to do. Thus far, it is true, it is 
the unskilled and the semi-skilled processes at which 
she is employed in the largest numbers. It was, one 
might say, the basement of industry to which she 
was first admitted. In every land that skilled work- 
man summoned to receive the government order, 
"You must let the women in," about to take his de- 
parture, turned at the door with cap in hand to make 
a stipulation. It was the last clause of the ancient 
"gentleman's agreement." 

"All right," the Government replied, "not any 
farther up than we have to." 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 179 

ON THE WAY TO THE TOP 

To-day at every convention or little district meet- 
ing of any skilled trade, there is one question for 
heated discussion, "How far are the women going?" 
The only answer is the woman movement that keeps 
on steadily moving. And it's moving up. With 
every year of the war there are more and more vacant 
places. More and more of these are places high up 
and higher up. And the women who are called, are 
coming ! There is Henrietta Boardman. 

Henrietta Boardman, "somewhere in England" 
has arrived at one of the highest skilled operations 
in munitions, tool-tempering. She sits before a Bun- 
sen burner and holds the tool in the flame while it 
turns all beautiful tints, straw colour, purple, blue or 
red. She must be able to distinguish just the right 
shade for its perfection. She does it so well that all 
the tool-fitters in the shop now have the habit of 
bringing to her, in preference to any other workman, 
the tools they want tempered. Because hers last 
longer! There sits next to her a skilled tool-tem- 
perer who is a member of the Engineers' Trade Union 
and the tools that he tempers will last for three- 
quarters of an hour: they are considered good by 
the trade if they last three-quarters of an hour. But 
the tools that Henrietta Boardman tempers are last- 
ing sometimes all night ! 

"It's curious," the foreman directing my attention 
to Henrietta Boardman's work commented. "Great 



180 WOMEN WANTED 

colour sense a woman seems to have. Nothing like 
it in men. Lots of 'em are even colour blind." 

"So?" I replied. "Then you must be putting in 
a great many women for tool-tempering." 

"Hush!" he answered, raising a warning finger. 
And then he smiled. "She's the first woman tool- 
temperer in England. So far there's only one other. 
You see, it's a highly technical operation," he went 
on to explain. "By the 'diluting' of labour scheme 
we aim to keep women in unskilled processes. We 
admit them to skilled processes only when it's un- 
avoidable." 

Now the workshop in which we stood, C-F-5, is 
the tool-room, confined to highly skilled processes. 
The employes, he told me, number 1000 and of these 
about 34 are women. 

There you have an excellent comparative view of 
the outlook for women in the most desirable occupa- 
tions. The way, it is true, is still a little steep and 
difficult. But with my eyes on Henrietta Board- 
man's bright flame, I saw that in making over indus- 
try they at least have set the ladder up: it goes all 
the way up! And they've made room at the top! 
Every week of this ghastly war, there is more and 
more room made at the top for women! It was in 
November, 1916, that an English manufacturer 
made the statement: "Given two more years of 
war and we can build a battleship from keel to aerial 
in all its complex detail and ready for trial, entirely 
by woman labour." 

Then what will become of the labour of men? 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 181 

That skilled workman, cap in hand, going down the 
steps of the Government House, met Gabrielle 
Duchene coming up. At least her message to the 
Government has been carried right to the War Office 
by the feminists in all lands. In England, after 
Mrs. Pankhurst's great triumphal procession, little 
Sylvia Pankhurst, feminist, led another which served 
as it were as a postscript to the first: it is in a post- 
script, you know, that a woman always put the really 
important thing she has to say. On the banner that 
Sylvia carried in London's East End was inscribed 
the feminist message: "We are willing to work for 
a fair wage!" 

Gabrielle Duchene stopped the skilled workman 
and showed him the message, which enunciates the 
demand: For equal work, equal pay. "It's your 
only protection," she urged. But he only grinned. 
And he pulled from his pocket a scrap of paper: 
"See," he said, "my government agreement that wom- 
an's admission into industry is for the duration of 
the war only." And it is true, he has that agree- 
ment. It is the basis on which all over the world 
the bargain was made: "Teach the woman how. 
It is a necessary but temporary expedient. When 
you return from the front, you shall have the job 
back. And the woman will go home again." But 
will she? 

The message that went up to the Government 
House asking equal pay for equal work is one of the 
most significant measures in the new woman move- 
ment. Ever since women began to be in industry 



1 82 WOMEN WANTED 

at all, the wage envelope for them has been very 
small, as lady-like an affair as an early Vic- 
torian pocket handkerchief — and just about as 
practical. Remarks of protest on the part of the 
recipient were customarily met with irritation or de- 
rision: Wages? Why, woman, what would you 
want with more wages anyhow — to buy a new ribbon 
to put on your hat? Now a man, of course, must 
have all the wages that he can get: he has to have 
them to buy the children's shoes and to pay the gro- 
cery bill and the coal bill and to support a wife who 
keeps his house and darns his socks. And, even if 
he has to have them to buy a cigar or a drink? Oh, 
don't ask foolish questions! A man has to have 
wages to meet all of his expenses, a large part of 
which is Woman. Now run along and be a good 
little girl ! 

But the new woman in industry can't be dismissed 
so easily as that. Especially a feminist in khaki 
can't. And she was respectfully saluting Govern- 
ment and begging to inquire if women were doing 
men's work so well as Government had said they 
were, when would women be getting men's pay? 

EQUAL PAY IS COMING 

And it was more than a "foolish question." It 
was a disturbing interrogation. Government looked 
up surprised from its war orders and statistical in- 
vestigations to answer: "Why, really, don't you 
know, woman's work isn't the same as man's. You 
see, we have made over the machines for her. And 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 183 

sometimes she stops for an hour and goes home to 
wash the children's faces." 

But the feminist said: "Isn't it the output that 
counts'?" And she spoke of the better work and the 
faster work than man that women were doing for 
two-thirds men's pay. See the girl drilling 1000 
holes at 50 centimes an hour where a man once 
drilled 500 holes for 75 centimes an hour! 

And about this time the skilled workman, dis- 
covering that the lady was getting a hearing, came 
breathlessly running back to interpolate that men had 
to be paid more because they knew more. Those 
women, for instance, who were "gauging" with such 
remarkable success knew only that one process, where- 
as the men knew the whole trade. 

But the lady had only a woman's logic: "If I 
wish to buy a dozen clothespins," she insisted, "I 
don't care how much the person who makes the 
clothespins knows, whether his knowledge reaches to 
mathematics or Greek. A dozen clothespins just a 
dozen clothespins are to me. What I am concerned 
about is only the delivery of the dozen." 

Well, anyhow, Government everywhere said it 
would think this matter over. Meanwhile the walls 
of Paris began to flame out with a great red and 
black poster that Gabrielle Duchene was putting up. 
It is some four feet long by three feet wide and at 
the top in large letters to be read a long way down 
the street, it insists : "A travail egal, salaire egal." 
And in every land the trained workman stopped to 
stare up at a lady like this at work in front of a bill- 



184 WOMEN WANTED 

board: "You fool," she turned on him in scorn, 
"can't you see now that it's equal pay for equal work 
for men's sakes?" 

At last he began to. Mme. Duchene is the wife 
of a celebrated architect in Paris. As the chairman 
of the Labour section of the Conseil National des 
Femmes, she had pled ineffectually for equal pay 
for women's sakes. When she cleverly changed the 
phrase "for men's sakes" it had a new punch in it. 
The aroused Bourse de Travail formed the now 
world-known Comite Intersyndical d' Action contre 
l'Exploitation de la Femme to back the feminist de- 
mand. And organised labour in land after land has 
begun to sign up its endorsement. For the flaming 
poster points out in effect : If a woman can be had 
to drill iooo holes at 50 centimes an hour, who will 
hire a man to drill $oo holes at 75 centimes an hour? 
That was the little sum the feminist set labour to 
work out the answer to. 

And for the Government, there was Mrs. Black's 
breakfast. If it takes a breakfast that includes three 
rashers of bacon to produce the maximum output of 
munitions for a day, how many munitions will be 
missing if you don't get the bacon? Mrs. Black 
wasn't getting the bacon. Welfare supervisors re- 
ported that while Mrs. Black ate her dinner with all 
its formulated calories at the canteen, she didn't eat 
her breakfast there. In fact Mrs. Black didn't seem 
to eat much breakfast anywhere. It wasn't the habit 
of the British working class woman: She usually 
started work for the day on merely a piece of bread 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 185 

and a cup of tea. Mrs. Black couldn't afford three 
rashers of bacon for breakfast ! 

The matter was investigated. The average wage 
for women in industry in England, it was found, had 
been 11 shillings a week: in the textile trade, before 
the war the best paid trade in the land, the weekly 
wage was 15 shillings 15 pence a week. And women 
wheeled shells in a munitions factory for 12 shillings 
a week, for which a man was paid 25 shillings. 

But it began to be arithmetically clear all around 
that it wasn't wise for a woman in England or France 
or anywhere else to be working for too little pay to 
buy a good breakfast ! That reliable organ of public 
opinion, The Times , announced September 25, 1916: 
"Proper meals for the workers is, indeed, an indis- 
pensable condition for the maintenance of output on 
which our fighting forces depend, not only for vic- 
tory, but for their very lives." 

W T hat should a woman do with wages to-day*? 
Why, she has to have them to buy not only a proper 
breakfast, but to buy the children's shoes and to pay 
the grocery bill and the coal bill and the creche or the 
maiden aunt who keeps her house. Even if she has 
to have them to buy a new ribbon for her hat — why, 
she will go without her bacon to get it ! What does 
a woman have to have wages for to-day? Oh, 
don't ask foolish questions. At last she has those 
mysterious expenses, even as a man ! 

I think that Lloyd George was the first man to see 
it. Great Britain led the way with the now famous 
Orders L-2, which has come to be known as the 



i86 WOMEN WANTED 

Munition Women's Charter. There is assured to 
women in the government factories and government 
controlled factories equal pay on piece work, equal 
pay on time work for one woman doing the work of 
one fully skilled man, and a minimum of £1 a week 
for all women engaged on work that was formerly 
customarily done by men. France followed with a 
declaration for equal pay for piece work for women. 
Governments have now enunciated the principle, 
have adopted it in practice and have recommended 
its justice to the private employer. Watch the 
skilled workman himself do the rest! Among the 
trade unions that have already stipulated equal pay 
for equal work for women doing war work in their 
craft are these: Engineering, cotton, woollen and 
worsted, china and earthenware, bleaching and dye- 
ing, furniture and woodwork, hosiery manufacturing 
and the National Union of Railwaymen. 

There has begun, like this, the greatest making 
over of all ! Better than all the bouquets they've 
handed us is the making over of our wage envelope 
to man's size! It isn't finished yet. Girl lift op- 
erators in London still get 18 shillings a week on the 
same elevator for which men were paid 23 shillings. 
On the tramways of Orleans, France, women con- 
ductors get 2 francs and 2.50 a day for exactly the 
same work for which men were paid 4 francs a day. 
Nevertheless the new wage envelope is not so lady- 
like as it used to be. It's coming out in larger and 
larger sizes. The London tailoring trade has in- 
creased the women's minimum wage from 3j/2d. to 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 187 

6d. an hour. In Paris the women conductors on the 
suburban lines have been advanced from the former 
4 francs a day to the men's 5 francs. Glasgow has 
1020 women conductors at men's pay, 27 shillings a 
week. London has 2000 women omnibus conductors 
with the wage formerly paid to men, 38 shillings 
a week. Even the German brewers have come to 
equal pay for women. Thousands of women in mu- 
nitions in England are making 30 shillings a week. 
Some at Woolwich are making £2 to £3 per week, 
a few up to £4 a week. Henrietta Boardman at a 
skilled man's job gets exactly a man's pay, 1 shilling 
id. and 1 farthing an hour, amounting to about £4 
a week. At the sixteenth annual congress of the La- 
bour Party, held in Manchester, England, in Jan- 
uary, 1917, the following resolution was introduced: 
"That in view of the great national services rendered 
by women, during this time of war and of the im- 
portance of maintaining a high level of wages for 
both men and women workers, the Conference urges, 
That all women employed in trades formerly closed 
to them should only continue to be so employed at 
trade union rates (the wages paid to men)." 

For the new woman in industry is too efficient to 
be countenanced as a competitor in the labour mar- 
ket to offer herself at a lower wage than men. Trade 
unions may even admit her as a comrade, not yet but 
soon. For she's safer to them that way ! In Eng- 
land they are giving their cordial support to Mary 
McArthur with her organisation, The National Fed- 
eration of Women Workers, in which there are al- 



188 WOMEN WANTED 

ready enrolled 350,000 women. In France they are 
backing Mme. Duchene, who in many of the little 
dim-lit cafes of Paris is holding meetings to organise 
the women in industry into what the French call 
"waiting unions." Why waiting? Because the 
men's trades unions are ready even to make over 
their constitutions to admit women to membership 
if necessary, that is, if women stay in industry. But 
they are waiting to see. And every little while they 
pull out from their pocket a soiled scrap of paper to 
look contemplatively at it. It is a government agree- 
ment. The Government has said the women will 
go home. But will they? 

WOMEN WANTED AFTER THE WAR 

Read the answer in the columns of "Casualties" 
appearing in the daily papers from Petrograd to Ber- 
lin and Paris and London and now New York. 
How many millions of men have been drafted from 
industry into the awful battalions of death, no gov- 
ernment says. But we at least know with too, too 
terrible certainty, that the jobs to which no man will 
ever return from the front, now number millions and 
millions. And there is going to be a world to be 
rebuilded! Every nation must enlist all of its re- 
sources if it is to hold its own in the international 
markets of the future. The new woman in indus- 
try, her country is going to keep right on needing in 
industry ! 

Her husband and her children may need her there ! 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 189 

After the men that are dead, there are millions more, 
the maimed, the halt and the blind, for whom women 
must work for at least a generation after the fight is 
finished. 

And her employer is going to need her! See all 
the rows and rows of little capstan lathes made 
smaller for a woman's hand? See the slender, sup- 
ple fingers so well adapted to, we will say, gauging. 
See Henrietta Boardman with her finer colour sense 
for tool tempering than any man in C-F-5. See, 
oh, see the girl who drills 1000 holes an hour, where 
the man drilled 500 ! 

Listen to Sir William Beardmore, owner of a pro- 
jectile factory at Glasgow, in an address before the 
Iron and Steel Institute: "In the turning of the 
shell body, the actual output by girls with the same 
machines and working under exactly the same condi- 
tions, and for an equal number of hours, is quite 
double that of trained mechanics. In the boring of 
shells the output is also quite double, and in the 
curving, waving and finishing of shell bases, quite 
120 per cent, more than that of experienced me- 
chanics." 

Again, in the workshops of Europe, above the 
rattle and the roar of crashing machinery in shop 
after shop, I hear the echo of some foreman's voice : 
"Here and here and here we shall never again employ 
men because we cannot afford to." In one great 
factory on the banks of the Seine where I inquired, 
"Are you going to keep women after the war?" an 



igo WOMEN WANTED 

American superintendent who had been brought over 
from Bridgeport, Connecticut, answered promptly: 
"Sure, 9000 of 'em. We're going to convert this 
into an automobile factory and we're not going to 
throw all this specially made-to-measure-to-woman- 
size machinery on the scrap-heap, you know." 

And the British Association for the Advancement 
of Science has investigated and decided and an- 
nounced : "Where female labour is either underpaid 
or is obviously superior to male labour, a special in- 
ducement offers itself to employers to retain the wo- 
men." 

Can't you see the efficiency expert at the elbow of 
Government, writing "Void" across the face of that 
scrap of paper ? Industry cannot afford to let the 
women go. 

And there are all the cloak-rooms with the plate- 
glass mirrors and the canteen dining-rooms done in 
pink, and blue, and duck's-egg green and the new 
uniforms that Parliament made for the woman in in- 
dustry ! Oh, gentlemen, after all, why should she go 
home 4 ? For the new place in industry is the most 
comfortable place in which she has ever been in the 
world! Oh, I know the sociologists used to talk 
about the factory as so unhealthful for a woman. 
But you see, that was because no man knew how hard 
was domestic labour: he had never done it. And it 
was before the experts began to gather data on how 
unhealthful is the home. 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 191 

FACTORY WORK EASY COMPARED WITH KITCHEN 

WORK 

There is now a most interesting investigation under 
way in London. It is a scientific intensive study of 
the housewife, who is at last to be tabulated and 
indexed, just like any other labourer. The Women's 
Industrial Council, who have undertaken it with the 
endorsement of the Government, announce: "It is 
quite probable the results may prove that the stretch- 
ing motions involved in such domestic tasks as the 
washing of heavy sheets and blankets are more harm- 
ful than the stretching motions of the shop assistant 
or the vibrations which certain engineering employes 
meet in their work." I went one day in London with 
the sociological investigator who is trying to find this 
out. She took me to Acton, which is the district 
where the washing is done for the great city. There 
are probably more laundries here than in any similar 
area in the world. We stopped to look at one of 
them. It is in a sanitary, new, up-to-date building 
with plenty of light and air and every new labour- 
saving device known to the trade. Then we called 
at some of the little cottages where live the women 
who work at this laundry. But to-day is Monday, 
which is the "slack" day of the week in the laundry 
business, and on Monday the employes remain at 
home to do their own "wash," with the same ap- 
pliances that have been used in home industry for 
a hundred years! The woman who came to the 
door when we knocked had just taken her hands 



192 WOMEN WANTED 

out of the suds. She was still wiping them on 
her gingham apron as she talked. Do you know 
what she said? At house after house it was 
this, that Monday at home was her hardest day 
of the week. "O, yes, ma'am," she said, "much 
harder than any of the days that I am at the laun- 
dry." Why? Because at the laundry she has no 
lifting of any kind to do and no backbreaking scrub- 
bing over a washboard. It is done by machinery, 
or if there are heavy sheets that must be lifted by 
hand, men are employed to do it. At home even 
when she's so fortunate as to have a faucet, all of 
the water she must carry in pails from the sink to 
the "copper" to be heated. 

Do you know, each time as we turned from a cot- 
tage door where the woman in the gingham apron 
stood wiping her wet hands, I thought of that lady 
in the engineering trade who operates an electrical 
crane from her easy chair ; and the women conductors 
in Manchester sitting down between fares on the 
"flap" seats put in for their comfort. I think I know 
what the medical journal, The Lancet, means when 
it announced in the February, 1917, number that 
"Factory work, under fitting conditions may be so 
beneficial to women that it may lead to permanent 
benefit to the race." And I am not surprised to 
learn that the Insurance Department of the English 
Government has recently discovered that the greatest 
percentage of illness among women occurs among 
domestic workers. 

You see, these new tasks are not so much more 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 193 

laborious than the old as the world feared. And 
this war has somehow brought about the most un- 
dreamed of readjustments. In a London tube sta- 
tion I came upon one of them : my startled gaze en- 
countered a man on his knees scrubbing the floor and 
a woman at the ticket window taking tickets! 

Do you know, the more I see of the woman in 
industry, the more it looks to me as if she could stand 
it. Anyhow, she's stronger than she used to be. 
One insurance society at Manchester with 26,000 
members found that it paid out for sickness benefits 
in 1915, £300 less than in 1914. The insurance 
actuary attributed the improved health to the better 
food and better clothing the members were now able 
to buy through the wages they were receiving in the 
munitions factories. The annual report of Great 
Britain's chief inspector of factories and workshops 
for 1916, commenting on the good health of the 
women employes, observes: "There can be little 
doubt that the high wages and the better food they 
have been able to enjoy in consequence, have done 
much to bring about this result." And you don't 
find among employers any more the complaint that 
women employes are less reliable than men because 
of their more frequent absences on account of ill- 
ness. Very likely they may once have been so. 
Only a very strong woman could have been equal to 
the old overstrain of a man's work in the shop plus 
a woman's work in the home. And there was often 
a marked lowering of her vitality and efficiency. 
But the new improved man's size wage envelope is 



194 WOMEN WANTED 

proving, you see, the effectual remedy. Wages 
enough to buy good food and then to pay for some 
one to cook it — that has made a new woman of this 
woman in industry. 

And she doesn't want to go back to general house- 
work in her own home, and to the "home" meals of 
white bread and boiled tea which the Home Office has 
specifically pointed out are not good enough on which 
to produce shells. She's accustomed now to her 
breakfast bacon ! The workingman's wife at house- 
hold labour had no Saturday half holidays in the 
kitchen. She had something like a sixteen hour day 
with no laws against overtime. Nobody bothered 
about how many hours she worked. Nobody 
counted her food calories. Nobody brought her 
roses. Nobody taught her to dance. Nobody 
noticed that she ought to be happy, without which 
she couldn't be efficient. Most of all, gentlemen, 
there wasn't any wage envelope there! 

Do you know of any reason why she should wish 
to go back? Some 3000 of her were asked about it 
through a questionnaire recently sent out in Eng- 
land. And of these 3000, 2500 answered : "I pre- 
fer to remain in the work I am now doing." I am 
sure Mrs. Black would. 

And I know the world is going to be very much 
surprised about it. But I think that Mr. Black, 
when he returns from the front, will prefer that, she 
should. For Mr. Black is going to get a better din- 
ner that way ! The industrial canteen can cook bet- 
ter and cheaper for him and Mrs. Black than she 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 195 

could at home. She can't make plum pudding in 
the home, as they can at the canteen for 2d. a portion. 
The chef who is buying for 1500 people gets rates 
that she never could for seven from the huckster and 
the fish-monger and the rest. Besides, Mrs. Black 
never had any special training for cooking, as she 
now has for engineering. In the shop she has learned 
to do one thing very well indeed. In her home 
there wasn't any one thing she ever had learned to 
do very well. And she worked ineffectually and 
inefficiently at several highly skilled occupations: 
child rearing and sewing and cooking and baking 
and laundry work and, occasionally, nursing. Isn't 
it remarkable at any stage of the world's evolution, 
that woman should have been expected to carry a 
schedule like that? You never found Mr. Black 
attempting to be a carpenter and a tailor and a 
plumber and a gardener and a whole lot of other 
useful trades all in one. No, Mr. Black's rule al- 
ways was, stick to one trade. Jack-of-all-trades ! 
Why, everybody knows that he could have been mas- 
ter of none! 

And Mrs. Black wasn't. Now, if after the war, 
she prefers to stay in engineering or some other trade, 
why should Mr. Black worry? The lady will pay 
for her own dinner and other things besides. She 
can send the wash to the laundry, and the baby will 
be at the creche for the day, and the children will 
have dinner at school. And at night, the family will 
have supper together, which Mr. and Mrs. Black 
on their way home from the factory can bring from 



ig6 WOMEN WANTED 

the communal kitchen. Governments already have 
started the fire in the new cookstove in the communal 
kitchen which England has set up in London and 
Germany in Berlin, because Ministries of Food have 
decided food can be more scientifically and efficiently 
cooked there than in the homes of the working people. 

THE NEW IMPROVED HOME 

Oh, can there be any one who would still wish to 
take away the new wage envelope*? Think what 
it's already done for the working-class home ! Chil- 
dren with shoes on their feet, you know. Women in 
England are wearing fur coats. Women in France 
who once wore sabots are now wearing shoes for 
which they have paid 40 francs, which is $8 a pair. 
In every warring country working women are shop- 
ping, shopping, shopping, as they never shopped be- 
fore. O yes, it's thrift and prudence and all that's 
proper, to put your earnings in war bonds instead. 
The rainy day, you know, that's ahead. And of 
course one must, for patriotism's sake, put some of it 
in war bonds, but not quite all. You see, when 
there have been almost all rainy days behind and 
you've always wanted something you couldn't have'? 
Well, Mrs. Black thinks you might as well live in 
the sunshine and have it, now you can. 

That's the way affluence seems to have happened 
to the working class home all over Europe. Pros- 
perity is fairly gilding over every district in which 
a munitions plant has arisen. And, oh, well, what 
if it is gilt? Gilt's good for little cheerless dingy 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 197 

houses. Do you know that, next to the war trades, 
the most flourishing trade in all Europe to-day is 
the cheap jewelry trade*? There are places in Lon- 
don's East End where every other shop or two has 
come to be a jeweller's shop, with the windows hung 
splendidly with all the shining trinkets that bring a 
shining light to women's eyes. 

Mr. Black was home on leave a while ago. He 
stopped the first thing at the jeweller's round the 
corner in Hardwick Row and bought the gold chain 
and the locket Mrs. Black's wearing now with his 
picture in it. Do you know, it was so long since 
he'd given his wife a present, not since their courting 
days, that he'd forgotten how? He was a lot more 
awkward about it than he is about facing a fusillade 
of German gun-fire. The perspiration just stood out 
on his forehead as he laid the little package on the 
kitchen table and said, "Mary, here's something I 
thought you might like." 

There was a note in his voice by which she knew 
it wasn't bloaters from the fish-shop over the way. 
But she no more expected what it really was than 
she hoped for an angel to lean out of the windows 
of the sky and say, "Mary Black, here's a gold crown 
for you." The paper crackled in the silent room 
while she untied the string. The chain just shim- 
mered once through her fingers. Her lips trembled. 
With a little cry, "O Jim!" she turned to lay her 
head in the old forgotten place on his shoulder. 
And there she sobbed out all the bitterness of seven 
years' married hardship and privation with the bear- 



198 WOMEN WANTED 

ing and rearing of five children in three rooms on 22 
shillings a week. 

Oh, there are things that gold chains are good for 
more than show. The famous uses of adversity are 
various. But they have been much oversung. And 
after all, God in his heaven perhaps knows that even 
a war may be worth while, if it's the only way. 
Two wage envelopes are better than one. The new 
woman with the old love revived in her heart, I'm 
sure, won't be so often cross and she won't have to 
slap the children so much as she did. Just think of 
the new home that the man at the front's coming back 
to ! Mrs. Black's saving now for a piano ! 

Mrs. Lewis, are you ready? The work- whistle 
calls you. My morning paper to-day advertises for 
a New York department store: "To patriotic 
women seeking practical means of expressing their 
earnestness: During the coming season, women of 
intelligence will have the greatest opportunity that 
was ever offered them to become producing factors 
on the nation's industrial balance sheet. Whether 
they need to work or not, they should work, because 
it will make them happier and give them a sense of 
satisfaction as nothing else in the world can under 
present circumstances. We can give many women 
work to do to occupy part of their time. This part- 
time work affords a woman, if she has home duties, 
plenty of leisure for her own housework — she need 
not leave her home in the morning until after the 
man of the house goes. She may return in the 
evening before he does — she will have more money 



THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE 199 

for her home or for herself and be an independent 
producing factor in her community, helping herself, 
her home, and in this way her country in a time 
when this kind of help is most needed." 

An American woman to-day will find opportuni- 
ties for work on every hand. The Homestead Works 
of the Carnegie Steel Company has 1000 women 
on the pay-roll. At McKee's Rocks, Pa., the 
Pressed Steel Car Company has 100 girls building 
artillery cars for use on the French front. The 
Farrell plant of the American Sheet & Tin-plate 
Company at Sharon, Pa., is employing women at 
$4.50 a day. A munitions factory at Dayton, Ohio, 
has 5000 women working at men's pay. The De- 
troit Taxicab and Transfer Company have women 
operating their electric taxicabs at the wages for- 
merly paid to men. The United Cigar Stores Com- 
pany is offering women salesmen men's wages. At 
the July, 1917, Lumbermen's Convention at Mem- 
phis, Tenn., the Southern Pine Association by a 
unanimous vote decided that women employed in 
men's places at the lumber camps should be paid 
the same salaries formerly paid to men. 

And Gabrielle Duchene's flaming poster has sent 
a light across the sea. The American Federation 
of Labour has voted: "Resolved that we endorse 
the movement to obtain from all governments at the 
time of the signature of the Treaty of Peace, the 
establishment of an international agreement embody- 
ing the principle of equal pay for equal work re- 
gardless of sex." 



200 WOMEN WANTED 

So? Then no one really expects the new woman 
in industry to go home after the war. There is a 
great High Court of the Ages in which man may 
propose the regulation of the Universe, but God 
Himself disposes. And that soiled scrap of paper 
will be, after all, only a scrap of paper in the great 
whirlwind of economic law that bloweth where it 
listeth. 



CHAPTER VI 
The Open Door in Commerce 

Something has just happened. A hidden hand 
has touched a secret spring. A closed door in a 
blank wall has opened. And one in the long cloak of 
authority seems to be standing at the threshold pleas- 
antly beckoning the Lady to cross formerly forbidden 
portals. 

For I feel like that, like a little girl living in a 
fairy tale that is turning true right before my eyes. 
This morning there has arrived in my mail a letter 
personally addressed to me from the New York Uni- 
versity School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance. 
It announces that the entrance of the United States 
into the war has revolutionised American business. 
That hundreds of thousands of men off for the front 
are leaving behind them hundreds of thousands of 
vacancies. That commercial houses are facing a 
shortage of trained and capable assistants. That to 
fill the positions which are daily presenting them- 
selves, women must enter business. That to give 
them the necessary training, this school offers no less 
than 142 courses from which they may make their 
preparation for executive positions of responsibility. 

It is the first time that I and the League for Busi- 
ness Opportunities for Women to which I belong, 

201 



202 WOMEN WANTED 

have ever thus received a personal invitation to the 
wide open world of commerce. The League since 
its inception some five years ago has been alertly en- 
gaged in looking, as its name implies, for business 
opportunities for women. We have always been 
obliged to look pretty persistently for them. Never 
before have they been presented to us. Now, see, 
the way is clear, they tell us, right up the steeps of 
high finance. 

The bursting bombs of war have done it. A ghast- 
ly Place aux Dames, it is in truth. But the stage 
is set. The cue is given. There is not even time to 
hesitate. Draughted, the long lines come on with 
steady tread. Now our battalions fall in step with 
the battalions of the Allies and the Central Powers. 
For English or Hun or French or Magyar or Russian 
or Serb or American, the woman movement is one 
like that. Through the same doorway of oppor- 
tunity we all of us shall enter in. There are blood 
stains on the lintel, I know. But this door, for the 
first time set ajar, is the only way, it appears, be- 
tween the past and the future. With the invitation 
from the New York School of Commerce on my desk 
before me, I too am at the threshold where the cen- 
turies meet. Down the vista that stretches before 
me, I look with long, long thoughts. 

And once more, Cecile Bornozi somewhere in Eu- 
rope is passing the sugar. In pursuit of food con- 
servation, hotel waiters have a way of removing the 
sugar bowl to the dining room sideboard and thought- 
fully forgetting to offer it a second time. And the 




MISS ELIZABETH RACHEL WYLIE 

Of the Financial Centre for Women in New York, who stands at 

the open door in commerce to usher :'n the women of America. 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 203 

pretty young woman in the chic hat, who sat opposite 
me at breakfast that morning, was near enough to 
reach it and daring enough to commandeer the sugar 
bowl for our common use. There is nothing, I be- 
lieve, like a lump of sugar that so quickly makes war 
time travellers kin. That is the way I came to know 
Cecile Bornozi, new woman in commerce. 

She is a type distinct from her predecessors in that 
old world of ours that is going up in battle smoke. 
Her brown hair is done in as coquettish a curl on 
her forehead, her eyes are as sparkling blue, her lips 
are as curving red as any girl's who used to have 
nothing to do but to dance the tango and pour after- 
noon tea. But her horizon has widened beyond the 
drawing room. Nor is she the business woman 
whom we have had with us for a generation. Why, 
the stenographer who takes my dictation is a busi- 
ness woman. But from her hand bag as another 
woman might produce a shopping list, Cecile Bor- 
nozi has just drawn forth a $50,000 bill of sale to her 
for a freight steamer. 

She has just purchased it because of the increasing 
scarcity of tonnage in which to transport the fire 
brick that she is buying for the reconstruction of 
factory furnaces in the devastated districts of France. 
Yesterday she shipped 90 cwt. of oil boxes and bear- 
ings and 6 railway coal wagons. In the past few 
months she has sent over some 2000 railway wagons. 
Like this, during the past year, she has expended a 
million dollars for railway rolling stock that she 
rents to the French Government. She is specially 



204 WOMEN WANTED 

commissioned by France for this undertaking, as her 
Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement spread 
in front of my breakfast roll shows to me and all of 
the Allies. A shipper has to have a license like this 
in these days. It is what secures for her her export 
permit from the London Board of Trade. Now she 
sets down her coffee cup and folds her newspaper 
and is off for India House in Kingsway where fore- 
gather other merchants who have confidential ap- 
pointments with the War Office and the English Gov- 
ernment. Upon her decisions to-day will depend 
so much more than the selection of a ribbon to match 
the blue of her eyes or the choice of the card to win at 
an afternoon bridge whist party. Her care and her 
forethought, her planning and her enterprise must 
outwit even the German submarines and get the 
goods across the English Channel to keep the trans- 
portation lines of a nation open for communication 
with the front. And there will be no superior at her 
elbow to tell her how. 

"I like big ventures. I like to do things myself. 
I'd sell flowers on the curb before I'd consent to be 
any one's else employe," the new woman in com- 
merce flashed back at me as she buttoned her coat 
collar and started out in a ten o'clock morning fog. 

RISING TO THE NEW OCCASION 

You see, it's like that. The big venture is the 
fascinating field that lies beyond humdrum directed 
routine. We have by now forgotten the stir that 
was created when perhaps thirty years ago the first 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 205 

woman walked into a business house to take her 
place at a typewriter desk. Let us not lose sight 
of the innovation of our own day that is about to 
command attention: the woman at the typewriter is 
rising. I think we shall see her take the chair before 
the mahogany desk in the president's office. 

The Woman's Association of Commerce of Amer- 
ica was recently organised at Chicago in a conven- 
tion of business women gathered from cities from 
New York to Chicago. For the first time adequate 
training to fit a woman for real commercial responsi- 
bilities is beginning to be as freely offered as to men. 
Cecile Bornozi, widely known as the only railway 
woman in France, came by her commercial knowledge 
largely through instinct and inheritance. She gave 
up literature at the Sorbonne for it, because as the 
daughter of Philip Bornozi, from Constantinople, 
who supplied rolling stock to the railways of the 
Orient, France, and Belgium, the call to commerce 
was in her blood. But except for the few specially 
placed women like that, the way up in commerce 
before the year 1914 was not plain and easy. Now 
all over the world there are floating in on the morning 
mail invitations like the one that has just come to 
me from the New York University. 

How much it means, I suppose no man can quite 
understand. Suppose you, sir, were going to attempt 
to talk glibly in terms of chiffon and voile and cham- 
bray and all the rest of those mystifying terms that 
tangle the tongue of a novice sent down the aisle of 
a department store with a sample in his lower left 



206 WOMEN WANTED 

hand vest pocket to be properly matched — you'd feel, 
wouldn't you, that a course in this positively un- 
known tongue would be helpful in making yourself 
and your errand rightly understood. Just so. Now 
all unknown language is a handicap as is this one 
to you, which is quite familiar to every woman, for 
we learn to lisp in terms of our clothes. But on 
the other hand, there are commercial terms which 
you as a boy imbibed as naturally from your environ- 
ment, which are to your sister a foreign tongue. We 
need the schools to teach it. And I am not sure but 
it is the schools now being set up by the women who 
have learned through their own experience that offer 
the surest interpretation of the way in these new 
paths in which women's feet are set to-day. 

Just off from Central Park West in New York 
City, the Financial Centre for Women has been estab- 
lished in direct response to the war demand. Wall 
Street asked for it. Already 60 young women in- 
structed in practical banking, investments, account- 
ancy, and managerial duties have been sent out to 
fill responsible positions in the National Bank of 
Commerce, Morgan's, the Federal Reserve and over 
half a dozen other of the leading banks of New York 
City. These young women have been given an inti- 
mate working knowledge of such mysteries as stop 
payments and certified checks, gold imports, cumu- 
lative and preferred shares and all the intricacies 
of the market and the terms in which "the street" 
talks. In the room with the green cloth covered 
table, about which sit these future financiers and 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 207 

captains of industry in training, there is a black- 
board. See the chalk marked diagram. By the 
routes mapped out in those white lines, they have 
brought furs from Russia, wheat from Canada, sugar 
from Hawaii. And all the money transactions in- 
volved have been properly put through. Thoroughly 
familiarised like this with international operations, 
there is more to learn for the making of a financier. 
I doubt if any but a woman would think to teach it. 
Miss Elizabeth Rachel Wylie, who directs the Finan- 
cial Centre, recalls her classes from the wide world of 
affairs through which they circle the globe, for per- 
sonal instruction. They have now the groundwork 
of the knowledge with which a business man is famil- 
iar. And Miss Wylie adds earnestly, impressively 
the last lesson: "Don't darn." 

You see, captains of industry don't. Even so 
much as an office boy who aspires to become a captain 
of industry doesn't. And the woman in the office 
who spends her evenings mending her stockings and 
washing her handkerchiefs, misses, say, the moving 
pictures where the man in the office is adding to his 
stock of general information. This tendency to re- 
vert to type has been the fatal handicap of the past. 
By the faint beginnings of an intention to discard it, 
you differentiate the new woman in commerce from 
her predecessor the business woman. By way of 
discipline that girl there at the green cloth covered 
table, whose bag of war knitting hangs on the back 
of her chair the while she's shipping furs from Rus- 
sia, will leave it at home to-morrow. Cecile Bor- 



208 WOMEN WANTED 

nozi wouldn't have done a million dollars' worth of 
business with the French Government the past year 
if she had stopped to knit. And if her thoughts 
had been on her stockings, she might have missed im- 
portant details in railway rolling stock. In her room 
at the Hotel Savoy in London, I never saw a needle 
or thimble or spool of thread. But on her table I 
noticed System, the magazine of business. 

APPROACHING HIGH FINANCE IN FRANCE 

Over on the banks of the Seine even as here on 
the banks of the Hudson, they are teaching women 
now the things that Cecile Bornozi knows. Not so 
long ago I stood in the Ecole Pratique de Haut En- 
seignement Commercial pour les Jeunes Filles in 
Paris. This practical school of high commercial in- 
struction for young girls is in the Rue Saint Martin 
in an old monastery, the Ancien Prieure de Saint 
Martin des Champs, where the Government has given 
them quarters. Here a high vaulted room of prayer 
has been turned into an amphitheatre. On rows of 
benches lifted tier after tier above the grey and 
while tiled floor, a hundred and twenty-five girls sat 
facing a new future. For the first time in history, 
la jeune fille who has always been more domestic 
minded than the young girl of any other nation ex- 
cept Germany, is being taught to be commercially 
minded. Curiously enough, "Thou shalt not darn" 
is a fundamental precept for success laid down by the 
director of the new school in France even as at the 
new school in America. Mile. Sanua in Paris has to 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 209 

be perhaps even more insistent about it than Miss 
Wylie in New York. These are 125 girls of the 
bourgeois e families, any one of whom, if the great 
war had not come about, would be this morning going 
to market with her mother to learn the relative values 
of the different varieties of soup greens. And this 
afternoon she would be occupied, needle in hand, on 
a chemise or a robe de nuit for her trousseau. Now 
she has been called to a totally new environment. 
Here she sits on a wooden bench, the sofa pillow she 
has brought with her at her back, a fountain pen in 
hand, her note book on her knee, adjusting herself to 
a career which up to 1914 no one so much as dreamed 
of for her. She is hearing this morning a lecture on 
commercial law, delivered by Mme. Suzanne Grin- 
berg, one of Paris' famous lawyers. Le Professeur 
sits on a high stool before a great walnut table, her 
shapely hands in graceful gesture accentuating her 
legal phrases. Every little while you catch the 
"n'est ce pas?''' with which she closes a period. 
And now and then she turns to the blackboard be- 
hind her to illustrate her meaning with a diagram. 

Mile. Sanua passes the school catalogue for my 
inspection and I notice a course of study that in- 
cludes : industrial trade marks, designs, etc. ; foreign 
commercial legislation; commercial documents, buy- 
ing and selling, banking, etc.; bookkeeping, com- 
mercial and financial arithmetic; course in merchan- 
dising, including textiles, dyes, etc.; political econ- 
omy, including the distribution of wealth, the mone- 
tary systems of the world, the consumption of wealth ; 



210 WOMEN WANTED 

pauperism, insurance, and charities ; the state and its 
role in the economic order, taxes, socialism ; economic 
geography and world markets ; law, including public 
law, civil law and laws relating to women; foreign 
languages. This is the curriculum now being ap- 
proached by the young girl who up to yesterday had 
nothing more serious in the world to occupy her 
leisure than to sit at the window with an embroidery 
frame in her lap watching and waiting for a hus- 
band. 

But you see three years ago, four years ago, Pierre 
marched by the window in a poilu's blue uniform 
and he may never come back. Marriage has hith- 
erto been the fixed fact of every French girl's life. 
Now numbers of women must inevitably, inexorably 
find another career. These girls here are many of 
them the daughters of professional men, doctors and 
lawyers. The girl in the third row back with the 
blue feather in her hat is the niece of President Poin- 
care. That one with the pretty soft brown eyes in 
the front row is married. The wife of a manufac- 
turer who is serving his country as a lieutenant in 
the army, she is trying as best she may to take his 
place at the head of the great industrial enterprise 
he had to leave at a day's notice when his call to the 
colours came. She found herself confronted with 
all sorts of difficult situations. Somehow she's 
managed so far by sheer force of will and somewhat 
perhaps by intuition to come through some pretty 
narrow situations. For the future she's not willing 
to take any more such chances. She has come to 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 211 

learn all that a school has to teach of the scientific 
principles and the established facts of commerce. 
Two girls here are the granddaughters of one of the 
leading merchants of the Havre. Their brother, 
who was to have succeeded to the management of 
the celebrated financial house, gave his life for his 
country instead at the Marne. And these girls, with 
the consent of the family, have dedicated their lives 
to taking their brother's place in the economic up- 
building of France to which the financial world looks 
forward after the war. 

You see like this the new woman in commerce all 
over the world is planning for a career that will 
never again rest with stenography and typewriting. 
Bringing furs from Russia and wheat from Canada 
is more interesting. There is nothing like prepared- 
ness. You are almost sure to do that for which you 
have specially made ready. And one glance at the 
programme of study for the Ecole Pratique de Haut 
Enseignement Commercial shows clearly enough to 
any one who reads, that it is what Cecile Bornozi 
with her flashing glance calls the "big venture" 
which is the ultimate aim of this girl with the new 
note book on her knee. Meantime France can 
scarcely wait for her to complete her training. 
Mile. Sanua has almost to stand at the door of the 
Ancien Prieure to turn away the employers who 
come to the Rue St. Martin to offer positions to her 
pupils. "Always they are asking," she says, "have 
I any more graduates ready'?" 

Avocat Suzanne Grinberg's soft musical voice 



212 WOMEN WANTED 

goes on in the amphitheatre expounding commercial 
law. Outside in her adjoining office, the little stone 
walled room with the religious Gothic window, 
Mile. Sanua tells me how it has come about, this 
new attitude on the part of her country to women 
who are going to find economic independence in the 
business world. In the cold little room in a war 
burdened land where coal is $80 a ton, we draw 
our chairs closer to the tiny grate. Mile. Sanua 
leans forward and selects two fagots to be added 
to the fire that must be carefully conserved with 
rigid war time economy. 

As she begins to talk, I catch the look in her eyes, 
the glow of idealism that I have felt somewhere 
before. Where? Ah, yes. It was Frau Anna von 
Wunsch in whose eyes I have seen the gleam that 
flashed the same feminist message. Frau von 
Wunsch was before the war the presedient of Die 
Frauenbanek. This was for Germany a most revo- 
lutionary institution that hung out its gold lettered 
sign at 39 Motzstrasse, Berlin, a woman's bank in 
a land where it was contrary to custom for a married 
woman to be permitted to do any banking at all. 
But "Women will never become a world power until 
they become a money power," said Frau von 
Wunsch. And they put that motto in black letters 
on all of their letter heads and checks. The armies 
of the world are now entrenched between the Seine 
and the Rhine and since 1914 of course hardly any 
personal word at all has come through the censored 
lines from the feminists of Germany to the feminists 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 213 

of France. One does not even know what has be- 
come of Frau von Wunsch and her Frauenbanck over 
there in Mittel Europa. But the ideal that she 
lighted, flames now in every land. 

Mile. Sanua's plan too is for a new woman in 
commerce who shall be a money power and a world 
power. And perhaps it may be France that is tem- 
peramentally fitted to lead all lands in achieving 
that ideal. The jeune fille, so carefully trained for 
domesticity only, has been known to develop won- 
derful business qualities after marriage. Invariably 
in the small shops of France it is Madame who pre- 
sides at her husband's cash drawer. A woman's 
hand has led industries for which France is world 
famous: Mme. Pommerey whose champagne is 
chosen by the epicure in every land, Mme. Paquin 
whose house has dictated clothes for the women of 
all countries, and Mme. Duval whose restaurants 
are on nearly every street corner of Paris. The 
commercial instinct is really latent in every French 
woman. There is scarcely a French household in 
which a husband making an investment of any kind 
does not first consult with his wife. This birthright 
then, why not develop it by training and add scien- 
tific knowledge to intuition'? 

That was the proposition with which the French 
Minister of Commerce was approached at the begin- 
ning of the war. It was his own daughter who 
came to the Bureau of State over which he presided, 
with a new programme. Mile. Valentine Thomson 
is the editor of La Vie Feminine, in whose columns 



214 WOMEN WANTED 

she had already advocated wider business oppor- 
tunities for women on the ground that France would 
have need of women in many new capacities. Now 
she came to ask that the High Schools of Commerce 
throughout the land should be opened to girls. 
Hitherto they had been exclusively for boys. The 
Minister of Commerce took the matter under con- 
sideration. The argument that girls should be pre- 
pared for responsibilities that every year of war 
would more surely bring to them sounded to him 
logical enough. Besides Mile. Valentine Thomson 
is a daughter with a most pretty and persuading way, 
a way that is as helpful to a feminist as to any other 
woman. So it happened that the Minister of Com- 
merce, in September, 1915, issued a circular recom- 
mending the opening of the national Schools of Com- 
merce to women. The Ministry could only recom- 
mend. Each Chamber of Commerce could ulti- 
mately decide for its own city. And there were but 
three cities in which the final court of authority re- 
fused, Paris, Lyons and Marseilles. 

Then in Paris Mile. Sanua decided that women 
too must somehow have their chance. She had al- 
ready organised her countrywomen in the Federation 
of French Toy Makers, for which she has far flung 
ambitions. This new industry which she is putting 
on its feet in France, she has planned shall supplant 
the made-in-Germany toys in the markets of the 
world. But the women who are handling the in- 
dustry must know how on more than a domestic 
scale. And Paris, the metropolis of France, offered 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 215 

them no commercial training. In the spring of 
1916 Mile. Sanua decided to go to the Department 
of State about the matter. There the Minister of 
Commerce, M. Thomson, furrowed his brow: 
"After all, Mademoiselle," he said, "have women 
the mentality for business? The Ministry of War 
has opened employment in its offices to women. 
And these girls now whom the Government has ad- 
mitted to clerkships here, some of them seem quite 
useless. Mademoiselle," he added wearily, "is a 
woman's brain really capable for commerce 4 ?" 

"Train it. Then try it. What we need is 
schools," said Mile. Sanua. 

A few moments later the conversation turned on 
the toy industry. "What do you know about the 
toy industry'?" asked the Minister of State curi- 
ously. She told him. And as the woman talked, 
his wonder grew. She did know about toys, that 
which would enable the French to defeat the Ger- 
mans in this branch of commerce after the other de- 
feat is finished. Would Mile. Sanua give a lecture 
on the toy industry before the Association Nation- 
ale d' Expansions Economique? And would she 
make a report before the Conference Economique des 
Allies'? Which she did. So here was a woman 
who had a brain worth while for commerce. Well, 
there might be others. If the Chamber of Com- 
merce in Paris was still doubtful, the Ministry of 
Commerce would take a chance on endorsing Mile. 
Sanua's proposal. They secured for her the Ancien 
Prieure. And she established the school for which 



216 WOMEN WANTED 

she gives her services. She has gathered a faculty 
which includes celebrated names in France, most 
of whom are serving without compensation. Three 
former Ministers of Commerce form part of the com- 
mittee of patronage for the school. And the first 
diplomas last June were conferred by a state official, 
the Inspector General of Education. For France is 
arriving at the conclusion that she will have need of 
trained women as well as such men as she can muster 
for the great economic conflict that is going to follow 
when the other battle flags are furled. 

So here at the Ancien Prieure 125 new women are 
coming into commerce. "N'est ce pas?" I hear 
Avocat Suzanne Grinberg's voice repeat. Mile. 
Sanua adds another fagot to the Are. Again as she 
looks up her eyes are illumined with the ideal that 
animates her in the service in which she is now en- 
gaged for her country. I think the women of 
France will be a money power and a world power. 

See them starting on the way. Already the Bank 
of France to-day has 700 women employes, the 
Credit Foncier has 400, and the Credit Lyonnaise 
has 1200 women employes. Clerical positions in 
all the government departments, including the War 
Office, have been opened to women. M. Metin, the 
under secretary of the French Ministry of Finance, 
has recently appointed Mile. Jeanne Tardy an at- 
tache of his department, the first time in the history 
of France that a woman has held such a position. 

Now in every country this same movement has 
taken place. Russia has had women clerks at the 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 217 

War Office, the Ministries of the Interior, Agricul- 
ture, Education, Transportation, and at the Chan- 
celleries of the Imperial Court and Crown Property. 
The Imperial Russian Bank employed women by 
preference. 

In the German government bureaus and offices, 
the women employes outnumber the men and they 
are to be found now in every bank in Germany. 
There are even new women in commerce in Ger- 
many conducting business houses that soldier hus- 
bands have left in their hands, who are beginning 
openly to rebel against the restriction which excludes 
women along with "idiots, bankrupts, and dishonest 
traders" from the Bourse in Berlin. And recently a 
petition has been addressed to the Reichstag for the 
removal of this bar sinister in business. 

moving on London's financial district 

Probably the largest invasion of the business of- 
fice, whether that of the government or of the pri- 
vate employer, has taken place in England. No 
less than 278,000 women have directly replaced in 
commerce men released for military duty. Petti- 
coats in the district that is known as the "city," I 
suppose are as unprecedented as they could be any- 
where in the world. The most visionary, advanced 
feminist, who before 1914 might have timidly sug- 
gested such an invasion, would have been curtly dis- 
missed with, "It isn't done." And in truth I be- 
lieve it never would have been done without a war. 
Down in Fenchurch Avenue, in the great shipping 



218 WOMEN WANTED 

district, I was told: "Really, don't you know, this 
is the last place we ever expected to see women. 
But they are here." 

The gentleman who spoke might have come out 
of a page of "Pickwick Papers." His silk hat hung 
on a nail in the wall above his desk. And he wore 
a black Prince Albert coat. He looked over his 
gold bowed eye glasses out into the adjoining room 
at the clerical staff of the Orient Steamship Com- 
pany of which he has charge. He indicated for my 
inspection among the grey haired men on the high 
stools, rows of women on stools specially made 
higher for their convenience. And he spoke in the 
tone of voice in which a geologist might refer to 
some newly discovered specimen. 

It was withal a very kindly voice and there was 
in it a distinct note of pride when he said: "Now 
I want you to see a journal one of my girls has 
done." He came back with it and as he turned the 
pages for my inspection, he commented: "I find 
the greatest success with those who at 17 or 18 come 
direct from school, 'fresh off the arms,' as we say in 
Scotland. They, well, they know their arithmetic 
better. My one criticism of women employes is that 
some of them are not always quite strong on figures. 
And they lack somewhat in what I might call staying 
power. Business is business and it must go on every 
day. Now and then my girls want to stay home for 
a day. And the long hours, 9 :3c) to 5 :oo in the city, 
well, I suppose they are arduous for a woman." 

"Mr. Clarke," I said, "may I ask you a question: 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 219 

What preparation have these new employes had for 
business 4 ?" 

And it turns out, as a matter of fact, most of them 
haven't had any. A large number of this quarter 
of a million women who came at the call of the 
London Board of Trade to take the places of men 
in the offices, are of the class who since they were 
"finished" at school, have been living quiet English 
lives in pleasant suburbs where the rose trees grow 
and everybody strives to be truly a lady who doesn't 
descend to working for money. It is difficult for an 
American woman of any class to visualise such an 
ideal. But it was a British fact. There were thou- 
sands of correct English girls like this, whose pulses 
had never thrilled to a career who are finding it now 
suddenly thrust upon them. 

"Mr. Clarke," I said, "suppose a quarter of a 
million men were to be hastily turned loose in a 
kitchen or nursery to do the work to which women 
have been born and trained for generations. Per- 
haps they might not be able to handle the job with 
just the precision of their predecessors. Now do 
you think they would?" 

Mr. Clarke raised his commercial hand in a quick 
gesture of protest : "Dear lady," he said, "I remem- 
ber when my wife once tried me out one day in the 
nursery — one day was enough for her and for me — 
I, well, I wasn't equal to the strain. Frankly, I'm 
quite sure most men wouldn't have the staying power 
for the tasks you mention." 

So you see, in comparison, perhaps the new women 



220 WOMEN WANTED 

on the high stools that have been specially made to 
their size, are doing pretty well anyhow. There are 
73,000 more of them in government offices, the 
lower clerkships in the civil service having been 
opened to them since the war. And no less than 
42,000 more women have replaced men in finance 
and banking. 

Really, it was like taking the last trench in the 
Great Push when the women's battalions arrived at 
Lombard and Threadneedle streets. That bulwark 
of the conservatism of the ages, the Bank of Eng- 
land, even, capitulates. And the woman movement 
has swept directly past the resplendent functionary 
in the red coat and bright brass buttons who walks 
up and down before its outer portals like something 
the receding centuries forgot and left behind on the 
scene. He still has the habit of challenging so much 
as a woman visitor. It is a hold-over perhaps from 
the strenuous days of that other woman movement 
when every government institution had to be barri- 
caded against the suffragettes, and your hand bag 
was always searched to see if you carried a bomb. 
But the bright red gentleman is more likely to let 
you by now than before 1914. 

Inside, as you penetrate the innermost recesses, 
you will go past glass partitioned doors through 
which are to be seen girls' heads bending over the 
high desks. And you will meet girl clerks with 
ledgers under their arms hurrying across court yards 
and in and out and up and down all curious, wind- 
ing, musty passage ways. I know of nowhere in the 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 221 

world that you feel the solemn significance of the 
new woman movement more than here as you catch 
the echo of these new footsteps on stone floors where 
for hundreds of years no woman's foot has ever trod 
before. 

The Bank of England isn't giving out. the figures 
about the number of its women employes. An of- 
ficial just looks the other way and directs you down 
the corridor to put the inquiry to another black 
frock coat. O, well, if that's the way they feel 
about it! Others with less ivy on the walls may 
speak. The London and Southwestern Bank which 
before the war employed but two women, and these 
stenographers, now has 900 women. One of Lon- 
don's greatest banks, the London, City and Midland, 
has among 3000 employes 2600 women. The new 
woman in commerce is emerging in England and 
these are some of the verdicts on her efficiency : 

Bank of England: "We find the women quick 
at writing, slow at figures. We have been surprised 
to find that they do as well as they do. But they 
are not so efficient as men." 

London, City and Midland Bank: "For accu- 
racy, willingness, and attention to duty, we may say 
that women employes excel." 

Morgan and Grenfells: "We employ women on 
ledger work. But we find they lack the esprit de 
corps of men. And they don't like to work after 
hours." 

Barclay's Bank: "We cannot speak too highly 
of our women clerks. They have shown great zeal 



222 WOMEN WANTED 

to acquire a knowledge of the necessary details." 
London and Southwestern Bank: "Women em- 
ployes are even more faithful and steady than men. 
But when there is a sudden rush of work, as say at 
the end of the year, they go into hysterics. We find 
that we cannot let them see the work piled up. 
It must be given out to them gradually. This, I 
think, is due to inexperience. When women have 
had the same length of experience and the same 
training as men, we see no reason why they should 
not be equally as capable." 

Now that's about the way the evidence runs. 
You would probably get it about like that anywhere 
in Europe. There is some criticism. Isn't it sur- 
prising that there is not more when you remember 
that it is mostly raw recruits chosen by chance whose 
services are being compared with the picked men 
whom they have replaced'? In England in 1915 
the Home Office moved to provide educational facili- 
ties for women for their new commercial responsi- 
bilities. There was appointed its Clerical and 
Business Occupations Committee which opened in 
London, and requested the mayors of all other cities 
similarly to open, emergency training classes for 
giving a ground work in commercial knowledge and 
office routine. These government training courses 
cover a period of from three to ten weeks. It is 
rather sudden, isn't it, three weeks' preparation for 
a job in preparation for which the previous incum- 
bent had years? 

And there are thousands of the women who have 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 223 

gone into the offices without even that three weeks' 
training. The cousin of the wife of the head of 
the firm knew of some woman of "very good family" 
whose supporting man was now enlisted and who 
must therefore earn her own living. Or some other 
woman was specially recommended as needing work. 
And there was another method of selection: "She 
had such nice manners and she was such a pretty 
little thing I liked her at once, don't you know." 

WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS 

'Urn, yes, I do know. Somewhere in America 
once there was an editorial chief who said to me, 
his assistant, "Now I need a secretary. There'll be 
some here to-day to answer my advertisement. 
Won't you see them and let me know about their 
qualifications." There were, as I remember, some 
fourteen of them, grey haired and experienced ones, 
technically expert and highly recommended ones, 
college trained ones, and one was a dimpled little 
thing with pink cheeks and eyes of baby blue. My 
detailed report was quite superfluous. Through the 
open door, as I entered his office, the chief had one 
glance: "That one," he said eagerly, "that little 
peach at the end of the row. She's the one I want." 

Like that, little peaches are getting picked in all 
languages. And after them are the others fresh 
from the gardens where the rose trees grow. And 
among these ornamental companions of her employ- 
er's selection, the really useful employe who gets in, 
finds herself at a disadvantage. The little peach 



22J WOMEN WANTED 

"bears" the whole woman's wage market. She has 
hysterics: all the wise commercial world shakes its 
head about the staying power of woman in business. 
And the whole female of the species gets listed on 
the pay roll at two thirds man's pay. 

The Orient Steamship Company, I believe, is giv- 
ing equal pay for equal work. To an official of 
another steamship company complaining of the in- 
efficiency of women employes, Sir Kenneth Ander- 
son, President of the Orient Line, put the query, 
"How much do you pay them?" "Twenty-five 
shillings a week," was the answer. "Then you 
don't deserve to have efficient women," was the 
prompt retort. "We pay those who prove compe- 
tent up to three pounds a week. And they're such 
a success we've decided we can't let them go after 
the war." But Sir Kenneth Anderson is the son of 
one of England's pioneer feminists, Dr. Elizabeth 
Garrett Anderson, and the nephew of another, Mrs. 
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the Na- 
tional Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. And 
I suppose there isn't another business house in Lon- 
don that has the Orient Steamship Company's vision. 
Women clerks in London business circles generally 
are getting twenty shillings to thirty shillings a 
week. The city of Manchester, advertising for 
women clerks for the public health offices, offered 
salaries respectively of ten shillings, eighteen shil- 
lings and twenty shillings a week, "candidates to sit 
for examination." 

Little peaches might not be worth more, it is true. 



MLLE. SANUA 

Who, at the Ancien Prieure in Paris, holds open the door 
commerce for women in France. 



of 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 225 

The troubled French minister was probably right 
when he complained that some of his new office force 
were quite useless. But there is a Federation of 
University women in England with perfectly good 
University degrees attesting mathematical profi- 
ciency. They say, however, that they cannot live 
on less than a minimum wage of three pounds a 
week. Awhile ago in Italy a group of women ac- 
countants were asked by the Administration of Pub- 
lic Instruction to replace men called to the front. 
With exactly the same academic licenses as men, 
they were nevertheless offered but two thirds men's 
pay. And they declined the proffered positions. 
Nor is it only England or Italy or Russia or France 
that presents this ratio between the wages of men 
and those of women in the business offices. The 
first resolution adopted by the new Women's Asso- 
ciation of Commerce of America was one demanding 
equal pay for equal work. Eventually the Wom- 
en's Association of Commerce and the Financial Cen- 
tre for Women and the Ecole Pratique de Haut 
Enseignement Commercial may succeed in cultivat- 
ing in the commercial world a taste for a higher type 
of employe than the little peaches of the past. But 
for the present it is the handicap that the business 
woman in routine office positions has to accept. 
And there is no Trade Union in commerce to care. 
Can you manage to give equal work on two thirds 
man's pay? 

If you can, this is the hour of your opportunity. 
The women's battalions are with every month of the 



226 WOMEN WANTED 

war drawing nearer, moving onward toward the 
president's office. The London and Southwestern 
Bank has advanced 200 of its women clerks to the 
cashier's window. The London City and Midland 
Bank a year ago promoted a woman to the position 
of manager of one of its branches. It was the first 
time that a woman in England had held such a posi- 
tion. Newspaper reporters were hurriedly des- 
patched to Sir Edward Holden, the president, to see 
about it. But he only smilingly affirmed the truth 
of the rumour that had spread like wildfire through 
the city. It was indeed so. And he had no less 
than thirty more women making ready for similar 
positions. 

Over in France at Bordeaux and at Nancy in 
both cities the first class graduated from the High 
School of Commerce after the admission of women, 
had a woman leading in the examinations. In the 
same year, 1916, a girl had carried off the first hon- 
ours in the historic Gilbart Banking Lectures in 
London. I suppose no other event could have more 
profoundly impressed financial circles. The Bank- 
er's Magazine came out with Rose Esther Kingston's 
portrait in a half page illustration and the announce- 
ment that a new era in banking had commenced. It 
was the first time that women had been admitted to 
the lectures. There were some sixty-two men can- 
didates who presented themselves for examination 
at the termination of the two months' course. Rose 
Kingston, who outstripped them all, had been for a 
year a stenographer in the correspondence depart- 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 227 

ment of the Southwestern Bank. Now she was in- 
vited to the cashier's desk. 

To correctly estimate the achievement, it should 
be remembered that the men with whom she com- 
peted, had years of commercial background and this 
girl had practically one year. There were so many 
technical terms with which they were as familiar as 
she is with all the varieties of voile. What was the 
meaning of "allonge"? she asked three of her fellow 
employes bending over their ledgers before she found 
one who was willing to make it clear that this was 
the term for the piece of paper attached to a bill of 
exchange. Fragment by fragment like this, she 
picked up her banking knowledge. Once the Gil- 
bart lecturer mentioned the "Gordon Case," with 
which every man among his hearers was quite fa- 
miliar. She searched through three volumes to get 
an intelligent understanding of the reference. 
Meantime, I think she did "darn" nights. You see, 
her salary was thirty shillings a week. 

THE NEW WOMAN AT THE PARTING OF THE WAYS 

This is for the feminine mind the besetting temp- 
tation most difficult to avoid. Can we give up our 
"darning" and all of the habits of domesticity which 
the word connotes? It is the question which women 
face the world over to-day. Success beckons now 
along the broad highway of commerce. But the 
difficult details of living detain us on the way to 
fame or fortune. And we've got to cut the apron- 
strings that tie us to yesterday if we would go ahead. 



228 WOMEN WANTED 

Which shall it be, new woman or old 2 Most of us 
either in business or the professions cannot be both. 
Dr. Ella Flagg Young, widely known as the first 
woman to so arrive at the top of her profession as 
Superintendent of Schools in the city of Chicago, 
received a salary of $10,000 a year. She had made 
it the inviolable rule of her life to live as comforta- 
bly as a man. She told me that she did not permit 
her mind to be distracted from her work for any of 
the affairs of less moment that she could hire some 
one else to attend to. She did not so much as buy 
her own gloves. Her housekeeper-companion at- 
tended to all of her shopping. And never, she said, 
even when she was a $10 a week school teacher, 
had she darned her own stockings ! 

There are a few women who have, it is true, man- 
aged to achieve success in spite of the handicap of 
domestic duties. But they must be women of ex- 
ceptional physique to stand the strain. I know a 
business woman in New York who, at the head of 
a department of a great life insurance company, en- 
joys an income of $20,000 a year. Yet that woman 
still does up with her own hands all of the preserves 
that are used in her household. Her husband, who 
is a physician with a most lucrative practice, you 
will note doesn't do preserves. He wouldn't if the 
family never had them. 

A woman who is a member of the New York law 
firm of which her husband is the other partner was 
with him spending last summer at their country 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 229 

place. She, during their "vacation," put up a hun- 
dred cans of fruit. I think it was between straw- 
berry time and blackberry time that she had to return 
to town to conduct a case in court. She had cau- 
tioned her husband that while she was gone, he be 
sure to "see about" the little green cucumbers. But, 
of course, he didn't. What heed does a man — and 
he happens also to be a judge of one of the higher 
courts — give to little green cucumbers? Long after 
they should have been picked, they had grown to be 
large and yellow, which, as any woman knows, takes 
them way past their pickling prime. That was how 
the woman who cared about little green cucumbers 
found them, when she returned from the city. In 
despair she threw them all out on the ground. The 
next day, turning the pages of her cook book, she 
happened to discover another use for yellow cucum- 
bers. Putting on a blue gingham sunbonnet, she 
went out to the field back of the orchard and labori- 
ously gathered them all up again. And she could 
not rest until on the shelf in her farm house cellar 
stood three stone crocks filled with sweet cucumber 
pickle. She just couldn't bear to see those cucum- 
bers go to waste. It is the sense of thrift inculcated 
by generations of forbears whose occupation was 
the practice of housewifery. 

The Judge doesn't have any such feeling about 
pickles or any other household affairs. When he 
goes home at night, he reads or smokes or plays bil- 
liards. When the lady who is his law partner goes 
home, even though their New York residence is at 



230 WOMEN WANTED 

an apartment hotel, she finds many duties to engage 
her attention. The magazines on the table would 
get to be as ancient as those in a dentist's office if 
she didn't remove the back numbers. Who else 
would conduct the correspondence that makes and 
breaks dinner engagements and do it so gracefully 
as to maintain the family's perfect social balance? 
Who else would indite with an appropriate senti- 
ment and tie up and address all the Christmas pack- 
ages that have to be sent annually to a large circle 
of relatives? Well, all these and innumerable other 
things you may be sure the Judge wouldn't do. He 
simply can't be annoyed with petty and trivial mat- 
ters. He says that for the successful practice of his 
profession, he requires outside of his office hours rest 
and relaxation. Now the other partner practises 
without them. And you can see which is likely to 
make the greater legal reputation. 

In upper Manhattan, at a Central Park West ad- 
dress, a woman physician's sign occupies the front 
window of a brown stone front residence. She hap- 
pens to be a friend of mine. Katherine is one of 
the most successful women practitioners in New 
York. Nine patients waited for her in the ante 
room the last time I was there. From the basement 
door, inadvertently left ajar, there floated up the 
sound of the doctor's voice: "That chicken," she 
was saying, "you may cream for luncheon. I have a 
case at the hospital at two o'clock. We'll hang the 
new curtains in the dining room at three. And — 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 231 

well, I'll be down again before I start out this 
morning." 

I know the Doctor so well that I can tell you 
pretty accurately what were the other domestic 
duties that had already received her attention. She 
has a most wonderful kitchen. She had glanced 
through it to see that the sink was clean and that 
each shining pot and pan was hanging on its own 
hook. She had given the order for the day to the 
butcher. She had planned the dinner for the eve- 
ning, probably with a soup to utilise the remnants 
of Sunday's roast. Then — I have known it to hap- 
pen — some one perhaps called, "O, say, dear, here's 
a button coming loose. Could you, 'er, just spare 
the time?' 

Well, ultimately she stands in the doorway of her 
office with her calm, pleasant "This way, please" to 
the first patient, and turns her attention to the diag- 
nosis, we will say, of an appendicitis case. Mean- 
while, down the front staircase a carefree gentleman 
has passed on his way to the doorway of the other 
office. He is the doctor whose sign is in the other 
front window of this same brown stone residence. 
What has he been doing in the early morning hours 
before taking up his professional duties for the day? 
His sole employment has been the reading of the 
morning newspaper! Katherine never interrupts 
him in that. It is one of the ways she has been such 
a successful wife. She learned the first year of their 
marriage how important he considered concentration. 



232 WOMEN WANTED 



Now you can see that there's a difference in being 
these two doctors. And it's a good deal easier being 
the doctor who doesn't have to sew on his own but- 
tons and who needs take less thought than the birds 
of the air about his breakfasts and his luncheons and 
his dinners, how they shall be ordered for the day. 
That's the way every man I know in business or the 
professions has the bothersome details of living all 
arranged for him by some one else. I noted recently 
a business man who was thus speeded on his way to 
his office from the moment of his call to breakfast. 
The breakfast table was perfectly appointed. "Is 
your coffee all right, dear?" his wife inquired solicit- 
ously. It was. As it always is. The eggs placed 
before him had been boiled just one and a half min- 
utes by the clock. He has to have them that way, 
and by painstaking insistence she has accomplished 
it with the cook. The muffins were a perfect golden 
brown. He adores perfection and in every detail 
she studies to attain it for him. The breakfast that 
he had finished was a culinary achievement. "Don't 
forget your sanatogen, dear," she cautioned as he 
folded his napkin. "Honey, you hx it so much bet- 
ter than I can," he suggested in the persuasive tone 
of voice that is his particular charm. She hastily 
set down her coffee cup and rose from the table to 
do it. Then she selected a white carnation from the 
centrepiece vase and pinned it in his buttonhole. 
He likes flowers. She picked up his gloves from the 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 233 

hall table, and discovering a tiny rip, ran lightly up- 
stairs to exchange them for another pair, while he 
passed round the breakfast table, hat in hand, kiss- 
in" the five children in turn. Then he kissed her too 
and went swinging down the front walk to catch the 
last commuters' train. 

I happened to see him go that morning. But it's 
always like that. And when she welcomes him 
home at night, smiling on the threshold there, the 
five children are all washed and dressed and in good 
order, with their latest quarrel hushed to cherubic 
stillness. The newest magazine is on the library 
table beneath the softly shaded reading lamp, and a 
carefully appointed dinner waits. All of the weari- 
some domestic details of existence he has to be 
shielded from. For he is a captain of industry. 

There are even more difficult men. I know of 
one who writes. He has to be so protected from the 
rude environment of this material world that while 
the muse moves him, his meals carefully prepared 
by his wife's own hands, because she knows so well 
what suits his sensitive digestion, are brought to his 
door. She may not speak to him as she passes in 
the tray. No servant is ever permitted to do the 
cleaning in his sanctum. It disturbs the "atmos- 
phere," he says. So his wife herself even washes 
the floor. Hush! His last novel went into the 
sixth edition. He's a genius. And his wife says, 
"You have to take every care of a man who possesses 
temperament. He's so easily upset." For the lack 
of a salad just right, a book might have failed. 



234 WOMEN WANTED 

'Er, do you know of any genius of the feminine 
gender for whom the gods arrange such happy aus- 
pices as that*? Is there any one trying to be a promi- 
nent business or professional woman for whom the 
wrinkles are all smoothed out of the way of life as 
for the prominent professional man whom I have 
mentioned? 

We who sat around a dinner table not long ago 
knew of no such fortunate women among our ac- 
quaintance. That dinner, for instance, hadn't ap- 
pointed itself. Our hostess, a magazine editor, had 
hurried in breathless haste from her office at fifteen 
minutes of six to take up all of the details that 
demand the "touch of a woman's hand." The pene- 
trating odour of a roast about to burn had greeted 
her as she turned her key in the hall door. She 
rushed to the oven and rescued that. Two of the 
napkins on the table didn't match the set. Marie, 
the maid, apologetically thought they would "do." 
They didn't. It was the magazine editor who 
reached into the basket of clean laundry for the right 
ones and ironed them herself because Marie had to 
be busy by this time with the soup. The flowers 
hadn't come. She telephoned the florist. He was 
so sorry. But she had ordered marguerites, and 
there weren't any that day. Yes, if roses would 
answer instead, certainly he would send them at 
once. The bon bons in yellow she found set out on 
the sideboard in a blue dish. Why weren't they in 
the dish of delicate Venetian glass of which she was 
particularly fond? Well, because the dish of deli- 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 235 

cate Venetian glass had gone the way of so many 
delicate dishes, down the dumb waiter shaft an hour 
ago. Marie didn't mean to break it, as she assured 
her mistress by dissolving in tears for some five min- 
utes while more important matters waited. A par- 
ticular sauce for the dessert depending on the deli- 
cacy of its flavouring, the editor must make herself. 
Well — after everything was all right, it was a com- 
posed and unperturbed and smiling hostess who ex- 
tended the welcome to her invited company. 

The guest of honour was a woman playwright 
whose problem play was one of the successes of last 
season. She has just finished another. That was 
why she could be here to-night. While she writes, 
no dinner invitation can lure her from her desk. 
"You see, I just have to do my work in the evening," 
she told us. "After midnight I write best. It's the 
only time I am sure that no one will interrupt with 
the announcement that my cousin from the West is 
here, or the steam pipes have burst, or some other 
event has come to pass in a busy day." 

We had struck the domestic chord. Over the cof- 
fee we discussed a book that has stirred the world 
with its profound contribution to the interpretation 
of the woman movement. The author easily holds 
a place among the most famous. We all know her 
public life. One who knew her home life, told us 
more. She wrote that book in the intervals of doing 
her own housework. The same hand that held her 
inspired pen, washed the dishes and baked the bread 
and wielded the broom at her house — and made all 



236 WOMEN WANTED 

of her own clothes. It was necessary because her 
entire fortune had been swept away. Does any one 
know of a man who has made a profound contribu- 
tion to literature the while he prepared three meals 
a day or in the intervals of his rest and recreation 
cut out and made, say, his own shirts? I met last 
year in London this famous woman who has com- 
passed all of these tasks on her way to literary fame. 
She's in a sanitarium trying to recuperate from nerv- 
ous prostration. 

THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS 

The hand that knows how to stir with a spoon and 
to sew with a needle has got to forget its cunning if 
women are to live successfully and engage in busi- 
ness and the professions. The woman of the present 
generation has struggled to do her own work in the 
office and, after hours that of the woman of yester- 
day in the home. It's two days' work in one. It has 
been decided by the scientific experts, you remember, 
who found the women munition workers of England 
attempting this, that it cannot be done consistently 
with the highest efficiency in output. And the 
Trade Unions in industry endorse the decision. 

This is the critical hour for the new women in 
commerce to accept the same principle. I know it 
is difficult to adopt a man's standard of comfortable 
living on two-thirds a man's pay. And I know of 
no one to pin carnations in your buttonhole. But 
somehow the woman in business has got to conserve 
her energy and concentrate her force in bridging the 



THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE 237 

distance that has in the past separated her from 
man's pay. There is now the greatest chance that 
has ever come to her to achieve it — if she prepares 
herself by every means of self-improvement to per- 
form equal work. Don't darn. Go to the moving 
pictures even, instead. 

For great opportunities wait. Lady Mackworth 
of England, when her father, Lord Rhondda, was ab- 
sent on a government war mission in America re- 
cently, assumed complete charge of his vast coal and 
shipping interests. So successful was her business 
administration, that on his resignation from the 
chairmanship of the Sanatogen Company, she was 
elected to fill his place. Like this the new woman 
in commerce is going to take her seat at the mahogany 
desk. Are you ready ? 

The New York newspapers have lately announced 
the New York University's advertisement in large 
type : "Present conditions emphasise the opportuni- 
ties open to women in the field of business. Business 
is not sentimental. Women who shoulder equal re- 
sponsibilities with men will receive equal considera- 
tion. It is unnecessary to point out that training is 
essential. The high rewards do not go to the un- 
prepared. Classes at the New York University are 
composed of both men and women." 

Why shouldn't they be? It is with madame at 
his side that the thrifty shop keeper of France has 
always made his way to success. 

The terrible eternal purpose that flashes like zig- 
zag lightning through the black war clouds of 



238 WOMEN WANTED 

Europe, again appears. From the old civilisation 
reduced to its elements on the battle fields, a new 
world is slowly taking shape. And in it, the new 
man and the new woman shall make the new money 
power — together. 



CHAPTER VII 

Taking Title in the Professions 

They are the grimmest outposts of all that mark 
the winning of the woman's cause. But they star 
the map of Europe to-day — the Women's War Hos- 
pitals. 

Out of the night darkness that envelops a war 
ridden land, a bell sounds a faint alarm. From bed 
to bed down the white wards there passes the word 
in a hoarse whisper: "The convoy, the convoy 
again." Instantly the whole vast house of pain is 
at taut attention. Boyish women surgeons, throwing 
aside the cigarettes with which they have been re- 
laxing overstrained nerves, hastily don white tunics 
and take their place by the operating tables. 
Women physicians hurry from the laboratories with 
the anesthetics that will be needed. Girl orderlies, 
lounging at leisure in the corridors, remove their 
hands from their pockets to seize the stretchers and 
rush to their line-up in the courtyard. The gate 
keeper turns a heavy iron key. From out the dark- 
ness beyond, the convoy of grey ambulances reaching 
in a continuous line from the railway station begins 
to roll in. 

On and on they come in great waves of agony 

239 



240 WOMEN WANTED 

lashed up by the latest seething storm of horror and 
destruction out there on the front. In the dimmed 
rays of the carefully hooded light at the entrance, 
the girl chauffeur in khaki deftly swings into place 
the great vehicle with her load of human freight. A 
nurse in a flowing headdress, ghostly white against 
the night, alights from the rear step. The wreck- 
age inside of what has been four men, now dead, 
dying or maimed, is passed out. Groans and sharp 
cries of pain mingle with the rasping of the motor as 
the ambulance rolls on to make way for another. 

The last drive in the trenches has been perhaps a 
particularly terrible one. All night like this, every 
night for a week, for two weeks, the rush for human 
repairs may go on. Men broken on the gigantic 
wheel of fate to which the world is lashed to-day 
will be brought in like this, battalion after battalion 
to be mended by women's hands. The appalling 
distress of a world in agony has requisitioned any 
hands that know how, all hands with the skill to 
bind up a wound. 

It is very plain. You cannot stand like this in 
a woman staffed hospital in the war zone without 
catching a vision of the great moving picture spec- 
tacle that here flashes through the smoke of battle. 
Hush! From man's extremity, it is, that the 
Great Director of all is himself staging woman's 
opportunity. 

The heights toward which the woman movement 
of yesterday struggled in vain are taken at last. 
The battle has been won over there in Europe. Be- 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 241 

tween the forces of the Allies and the Kaiser, it is, 
that another fortress of ancient prejudice has fallen 
to the waiting women's legions. It was entirely un- 
expected, entirely unplanned by any of the embat- 
tled belligerents. Woman had been summoned to 
industry. The proclamation that called her went 
up on the walls of the cities almost as soon as the 
call of the men to the colours. There were women 
porters at the railway stations of Europe, women 
running railroads, women driving motor vans, 
women unloading ships, women street cleaners, 
women navvies, women butchers, women coal heav- 
ers, women building aeroplanes, women doing 
danger duty in the T. N. T. factories of the arsenals, 
and in every land women engaged in those 96 trades 
and 1701 jobs in which the British War Office au- 
thoritatively announced: "They have shown them- 
selves capable of successfully replacing the stronger 
sex." 

Let the lady plough. Teach her to milk. She 
can have the hired man's place on the farm. She 
can release the ten dollar a week clerk poring over 
a ledger. She can make munitions. Her country 
calls her. But the female constitution has not been 
reckoned strong enough to sit on the judge's bench. 
And Christian lands unanimously deem it indelicate 
for a woman to talk to God from a pulpit. From 
the arduous duties of the professions, the world 
would to the last professional man protect the 
weaker sex. 

Then, hark ! Hear the Dead March again ! As 



242 WOMEN WANTED 

inexorably as in the workshops and the offices, it 
began to echo through the seminaries and the col- 
leges, through the laboratories and the law courts. 
Listen! The sound of marching feet. The new 
woman movement is here too at the doors. High 
on the walls of Leipzig and the Sorbonne, of Oxford 
and Cambridge and Moscow and Milan, on all of 
the old world institutions of learning, the long scrolls 
of the casualty lists commenced to go up. Whole 
cloisters and corridors began to be black with the 
names of men "dead on the field of honour." And 
civilisation faced the inexorable sequel. Women at 
last in the professions now are taking title on equal 
terms with men. 

The doors of a very old established institution in 
Fifty-ninth Street, New York, swung open on a day 
last autumn. And a line of young women passed 
through. They went up the steps to take their place 
— for the first time that women had ever been there 
— in the class rooms of the College of Physicians and 
Surgeons. There is perhaps a little awkward mo- 
ment of surprise, of curiosity. A professor nods in 
recognition to the new comers. The class of 1921 
smiles good naturedly. An incident is closed. 

And an epoch is begun. Outside on a high scaf- 
folding there are masons and carpenters at work. 
See them up there against a golden Indian summer 
sky. They are putting the finishing touches on a 
new $80,000 building addition. And the ringing of 
their hammers and chisels, the scraping of their 
trowels is but significant of larger building opera- 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 243 

tions on a stupendous scale not made by human 
hands. 

A LOOK BACKWARD IN MEDICINE 

This is the College of Physicians and Surgeons of 
Columbia University, which after more than a hun- 
dred years of history has decided to enlarge its ac- 
commodations and add a paragraph to its catalog 
announcing the admission of women. To under- 
stand the significance of this departure from custom 
and precedent we should recall the ostracism which 
women have in the past been obliged to endure in 
the medical profession. Elizabeth Blackwell, the 
first woman of modern times in any land to achieve 
a medical education, knocked in vain at the doors 
of some twelve medical colleges of these United 
States before one reluctantly admitted her. She 
was graduated in 1849 at the Geneva Medical Col- 
lege now a part of Syracuse University. The en- 
trance of this first woman into the medical profession 
created such a stir that Emily Blackwell the second 
woman to become a doctor, following in the foot- 
steps of her sister, found even more obstacles in her 
path. The Geneva college having incurred the dis- 
pleasure of the entire medical fraternity now closed 
its doors and refused to admit another woman. 
Emily Blackwell going from city to city was at last 
successful in an appeal to the medical college of 
Cleveland, Ohio, which graduated her in 1852. So 
great was the opposition now to women in the pro- 
fession, that it was clear that they must create their 



244 WOMEN WANTED 

own opportunities for medical education. In turn 
there were founded in 1850 the Philadelphia Medi- 
cal College for Women with which the name of 
Ann Preston is associated as the first woman dean; 
in 1853 the New York Infirmary to which in 1865 
was added the Woman's Medical College both insti- 
tutions founded by the Drs. Blackwell; in 1863 
the New York Medical College and Hospital for 
Women. "Females are ambitious to dabble in medi- 
cine as in other matters with a view to reorganising 
society," sarcastically commented the Boston Medi- 
cal and Surgical Journal. Society as also the medi- 
cal profession coldly averted its face from these 
pioneer women doctors. 

"Good" women used to draw aside their skirts 
when they passed Elizabeth Blackwell in church. 
When she started in practice in New York City she 
had to buy a house because no respectable residence 
would rent her office room. Dr. Anna Manning 
Comfort had her sign torn down in New York. 
Druggists in Philadelphia refused to fill prescrip- 
tions for Dr. Hannah Longshore. Girl medical 
students were hissed and jeered at in hospital wards. 
Men physicians were forbidden by the profession to 
lecture in women's colleges or to consult with women 
doctors. Not until 1876 did the American Medical 
Association admit women to membership. How 
medical men felt about the innovation, which State 
after State was now compelled to accept, was voiced 
by the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of 1879 
which said : "We regret to be obliged to announce 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 245 

that, at a meeting of the councillors held Oct. 1, it 
was voted to admit women to the Massachusetts 
Medical Society." 

Syracuse University, recovering from the censure 
visited upon it for receiving Elizabeth Blackwell, 
was the first of the coeducational institutions to wel- 
come women on equal terms with men to its medical 
college. Other coeducational colleges in the West 
later began to take them. In 1894 when Miss Mary 
Garrett endowed Johns Hopkins University with 
half a million dollars on condition that its facilities 
for the study of medicine be extended to women 
equally with men, a new attitude toward the woman 
physician began to be manifest. From that time on, 
she was going to be able with little opposition to get 
into the medical profession. Her difficulty would 
be to get up. Now no longer was a woman doctor 
refused office facilities in the most fashionable resi- 
dential quarters in which she could pay the rent. 
Her problem however was just that — to pay the 
rent. A medical diploma doesn't do it. And to 
practise medicine successfully, therapeutically and 
financially, without a hospital training and experi- 
ence is about as easy as to learn to swim without 
going near the water. The most desirable oppor- 
tunities for this hospital experience were by the tacit 
gentleman's agreement in the profession quite gen- 
erally closed to women. 

Until very recently, internships in general hos- 
pitals were assigned almost exclusively to men. Dr. 
Emily Dunnung Barringer in 1903 swung herself 



246 WOMEN WANTED 

aboard the padded seat in the rear of the Gouvern- 
eur Hospital ambulance, the first woman to receive 
an appointment as ambulance surgeon in New York 
City. Twice before in competitive examinations 
she had won such a place, but the commissioner of 
public charities had declined to appoint her because 
she was a woman. In 1908 another girl doctor, Dr. 
Mary W. Crawford in a surgeon's blue cap and coat 
with a red cross on her sleeve, answered her first 
emergency call as ambulance surgeon for Williams- 
burg Hospital, Brooklyn. It happened this way: 
the notification sent by the Williamsburg Hospital 
to Cornell Medical College that year by some over- 
sight read that the examination for internship would 
be open to "any member of the graduating class." 

When "M. W. Crawford" who had made appli- 
cation in writing, appeared with a perfectly good 
Cornell diploma in her hand, the authorities were 
amazed. But they did not turn her away. They 
undoubtedly thought as did one of the confident 
young men applicants who said: "She hasn't a 
chance of passing. Being a girl is a terrible handi- 
cap in the medical profession." When she had 
passed however at the head of the list of thirty-five 
young men, the trustees endeavoured to get Dr. Mary 
to withdraw. When she firmly declined to do so, 
though they said it violated all established precedent, 
they gave her the place. And a new era in medicine 
had been inaugurated. 

Here and there throughout the country, other 
women now began to be admitted to examinations 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 247 

for internships. They exhibited an embarrassing 
tendency for passing at the head of the list. Any of 
them were likely to do it. The only way out of the 
dilemma, then was for the hospital authorities to 
declare, as some did, that the institution had "no 
accommodations for women doctors" which simply 
meant that all of the accommodations had been as- 
signed to men. It is on this ground that Philadel- 
phia's Blockley Hospital, the first large city alms- 
house in the country to open to women the competi- 
tive examination for internship, again and again 
refused the appointment even to a woman who had 
passed at the head of the list. It was 1914 be- 
fore Bellevue in New York City found a place for 
the woman intern : five women were admitted among 
the eighty-three men of the staff. 

This unequal distribution of professional privi- 
leges was the indication of a lack of professional fel- 
lowship far reaching in consequences. Among the 
exhibits in the laboratories to-day, there is a glass 
bottle containing a kidney perserved in alcohol. In 
all the annals of the medical profession, I believe, 
there has seldom been another kidney just like it. 
For some reason or other, too technical for a layman 
to understand, it is a very wonderful kidney. Now 
it happens that a young woman physician discovered 
the patient with that kidney and diagnosed it. A 
woman surgeon operated on that kidney and removed 
it successfully. Then a man physician came along 
and borrowed it and read a paper on it at a medical 
convention. He is now chronicled throughout the 



248 WOMEN WANTED 

medical fraternity with the entire credit for the 
kidney. 

"And it isn't his. It's our kidney," I heard the 
girl doctor say with flashing eyes. "You'll take it 
easier than that when you're a little older, my dear," 
answered the woman surgeon who had lived longer 
in the professional atmosphere that is so chilling to 
ambition. 

It was against handicaps like this that the women 
in medicine were making progress. Dr. Gertrude B. 
Kelly's name, in New York, is at the top in the an- 
nals of surgery. Dr. Bertha Van Hoesen is a fa- 
mous surgeon in Chicago. Dr. Mary A. Smith and 
Dr. Emma V. P. Culbertson are leading members 
of the medical profession in Boston. Dr. Lillian 
K. P. Farrar was in 1917 appointed visiting surgeon 
on the staff of the Women's Hospital in New York, 
the first woman in New York City to receive such an 
appointment. Dr. S. Josephine Baker, who estab- 
lished in New York the first bureau of child hygiene 
in the world, is probably more written of than is any 
man in medicine. As chief of this department, she 
has under her direction 720 employes and is charged 
with the expenditure annually of over a million dol- 
lars of public money. She is a graduate of Dr. 
Blackwell's medical college in which social hygiene 
first began to be taught with the idea of making 
medicine a preventive as well as a curative art. It 
was the idea that Harvard University a few years 
incorporated in a course leading to the degree "Doc- 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 249 

tor of Public Health." And though a woman had 
thus practically invented "public health" and an- 
other woman, Dr. Baker is the first real and original 
doctor of public health, Dr. Baker herself was re- 
fused at Harvard the opportunity to take their course 
leading to such a title. The university did not ad- 
mit women. But a little later the trustees of Belle- 
vue Hospital Medical College, initiating the course 
and looking about for the greatest living authority to 
take this university chair, came hat in hand to Dr. 
Baker, even though their institution does not admit 
women to the class rooms. "Gentlemen," she an- 
swered, 'Til accept the chair you offer me with one 
stipulation, that I may take my own course of lec- 
tures and obtain the degree Doctor of Public Health 
elsewhere refused me because I am a woman." Like 
this the woman who has practically established the 
modern science of public health, in 1916 came into 
her title. It is probably the last difficulty and dis- 
crimination that the American woman in medicine 
will ever encounter. 

The struggle of women for a foothold in the 
medical profession is the same story in all lands. It 
was the celebrated Sir William Jenner of England 
who pronounced women physically, mentally and 
morally unfit for the practice of medicine. Under 
his distinguished leadership the graduates of the 
Royal College of Physicians in London pledged them- 
selves, "As a duty we owe it to the college and to the 
profession and to the public to offer the fullest re- 



250 WOMEN WANTED 

sistance to the admission of women to the medical 
profession." Well, they have. The medical fra- 
ternity in all lands took up the burden of that pledge. 

A WORLD WIDE RECONSTRUCTION 

But to-day see the builders at work at the College 
of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. Yale 
and Harvard have also announced the admission of 
women to their medical colleges. And it is not by 
chance now that these three most exclusive medical 
colleges in the United States have almost simul- 
taneously removed their restrictions. They are 
doing it too at the University of Edinburgh and at 
the University of Moscow. The reverberation from 
the firing line on the front is shaking all institutions 
to their foundations. As surely as if shattered by 
a bomb, their barriers go down. Like that, the 
boards of trustees in all countries are capitulating to 
the Great Push of the new woman movement. All 
over the world to-day the hammers and chisels are 
ringing in reconstruction. It is the new place in the 
sun that is being made for woman. The little doors 
of Harvard and Yale and Columbia are creaking on 
their ancient hinges because the gates of the future 
are swinging wide. It is not a thin line that is 
passing through. The cohorts of the woman's cause 
are sweeping on to occupy the field for which their 
predecessors so desperately pioneered. 

Forward march, the woman doctor! It is the 
clear call flung back from the battle fields. Hear 
them coming! See the shadowy figures that lead 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 251 

the living women! With 8000 American women 
doctors to-day marches the soul of Elizabeth Black- 
well. Leading 3000 Russian women doctors there 
is the silent figure of Marie Souslova, the first medi- 
cal woman of that land, who in 1865 was denied her 
professional appellation and limited to the title 
"scientific midwife." With the 1 100 British women 
there keeps step the spirit of Sophia Jex Blake pelted 
with mud and denied a degree at Edinborough 
University, who in 1874 founded the London School 
of Medicine for Women. 

And there is one grand old woman who lived to 
see the cause she led for a lifetime won at last. 
The turn of the tide to victory, as surely as for the 
Allies at Verdun or the Marne, came for the profes- 
sional woman's cause when the British War Office 
unfurled the English flag over Endel Street Hos- 
pital, London. It floated out on the dawn of a 
new day, the coming of which flashed with fullest 
significance on the vision of Elizabeth Garrett An- 
derson. 1 The beautiful eyes of her youth were not 
yet so dimmed with her eighty years but that all of 
their old star fire glowed again when the news of this 
great war hospital, entirely staffed by women, was 
brought to her at her home in Aldebourough, Suffolk, 
where she sat in her white cap, her active hands that 
had wrought a remarkable career now folded quietly 
in her lap. 

Dr. Anderson was the second woman physician of 

1 Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson died at Aldebourough, Suffolk, 
England, Dec. 17, 1917. 



252 WOMEN WANTED 

modern times, the first in England. When as Eliza- 
beth Garrett she came to London to be a doctor in 
i860, there was no University in her land that 
would admit her. Physicians with whom she wished 
to study, were some of them scornful and some of 
them rude, and some were simply amazed. "Why 
not become a nurse*?" one more tolerant than the 
rest suggested. The girl shook her head : "Because 
I mean to make an income of a thousand pounds a 
year instead of forty." The kindly old doctor who 
finally yielded to her importunities and admitted her 
to his office, also let her in to the lectures at the 
Middlesex Hospital with the specific arrangement 
that she should "dress like a nurse" and promise 
earnestly "not to look intelligent." Her degree she 
had to go to Paris for. Like that she got into the 
medical profession in 1871 a year before her mar- 
riage to the director of the Orient steamship line. 
Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women 
and founder of the New Hospital for Women, she 
came through the difficult days when it was only in 
"zenana" practice in India that English women doc- 
tors had a free field. Russia too dedicated her pio- 
neer medical women to the heathen, modestly design- 
ing them for the Mussulman population and at 
length permitting them the designation "physician 
to women and children." That idea lingered long 
with civilisation. As late as 1910 a distinguished 
British surgeon in a public address allowed that there 
was this province for the woman physician, the treat- 
ment of women and children. But any medicaj 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 253 

woman "who professed to treat all comers," her he 
held to be an "abomination." 

Then the world turned in its orbit and came to 
1914. And Elizabeth Anderson's eyes looked on 
the glory of Endel Street. Do you happen to be of 
that woman movement which but yesterday moved 
upward toward the top in any of the professions so 
laboriously and so heavily handicapped? Then for 
you also, Endel Street is the shining citadel that to- 
day marks the final capitulation of the medical pro- 
fession to the woman's cause, as surely as the New 
York Infirmary in Livingston Place still stands as 
the early outpost established by the brave pioneers. 
But the ordinary chance traveller who may search 
out the unique war hospital in the parish of St. 
Giles in High Holborn, I suppose may miss some of 
this spiritual significance to which a woman thrills. 
The buildings which have been converted from an 
ancient almshouse to the uses of a hospital are as 
dismal and as dingy as any can be in London. They 
are surrounded by a fifteen foot high brick wall cov- 
ered with war placards, a red one "Air Raid Warn- 
ing," a blue one "Join the Royal Marines," and a 
black one "Why More Men are Needed. This is 
going to be a long drawn out struggle. We shall 
not sheathe the sword until — " and the rest is torn 
off where it flapped loose in the winter wind. 

In a corner of this wall is set Christ Church, be- 
side which a porter opens a gate to admit you to 
the courtyard. Here where the ambulances come 
through in the dark, the bands play on visitors' day. 



254 WOMEN WANTED 

It is a grey court yard with ornamental boxes of 
bright green privet. On the benches about wait the 
soldiers, legless soldiers, armless soldiers, some of 
them blind soldiers. On convalescent parade in blue 
cotton uniform with the gaiety of red neckties, every 
man of them at two o'clock on a Tuesday is eager, ex- 
pectant, waiting — for his woman. Mothers, wives, 
sweethearts are arriving, the girls with flowers, the 
women with babies in their arms. And each grabs 
his own to his hungry heart. You go by the terrible 
pain and the terrible joy of it all that grips you so 
at the throat. Inside where each woman just sits by 
the bedside to hold her man's hand, it is more numb 
and more still. A girl orderly in khaki takes you 
through. Her blue shoulder straps are brass let- 
tered "W. H. C," "Women's Hospital Corps. 
The only man about the place who is not a patient 
is the porter at the gate. The women in khaki with 
the epaulets in red, also brass lettered "W. H. C," 
are the physicians and surgeons. 

There is one of these you should not miss. You 
will know her by her mascot, the little fluffy white 
dog "Baby" that follows close at her heels. Her 
figure in its Norfolk belted jacket is slightly below 
the medium height. Her short swinging skirt re- 
veals trim brown clad ankles and low brown shoes. 
She has abundant red brown hair that is plainly 
parted and rolled away on either side from a low 
smooth brow to fasten in a heavy knot at the back 
of her head. I set down all of these details as being 
of some interest concerning a woman you surely will 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 255 

want to see. Surgeon in chief and the commanding 
officer in charge of this military hospital with 600 
beds, she is the daughter of Dr. Elizabeth Garrett 
Anderson. She is also the niece of Mrs. Millicent 
Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of 
Women's Suffrage Societies. And she is to-day one 
of England's greatest surgeons, Dr. Louisa Garrett 
Anderson, with the rank of major in the English 
army. 

Her place in this new woman movement is the 
more significant because of her prominent affiliation 
with that of yesterday. For the militancy in which 
she is now enlisted Dr. Anderson had her training 
in that other militancy that landed women in Hollo- 
way Jail. Her transfer to her present place of gov- 
ernment service has come about in a way that makes 
her one of our most famous victory exhibits. "You 
have silenced all your critics" the War Office told 
her when they bestowed on her the honour of her 
present official rank as she and her Woman's Hos- 
pital Corps "took" Endel Street. 

It was a stronghold that did not capitulate by any 
means at the first onslaught of the women's forces. 
There was, at least, as you might say, a preliminary 
skirmish. The Woman's Hospital Corps raised and 
financed by British medical women was at the begin- 
ning of the war offered to the British Government. 
But in the public eye these were only "physicians to 
women and children." Kitchener swore a great oath 
and said he'd have none of them for his soldiers. 
Practically the War Office told them to "run along." 



256 WOMEN WANTED 

Well, they did. They went over the Channel. 
"They are going now to advance the woman's cause 
by a hundred years. O, if only I were ten years 
younger," sighed Elizabeth Anderson wistfully as 
she waved them farewell at Southampton on the 
morning of Sept. 15, 1914. 

France was in worse plight than England. Under 
the Femmes de France of the Croix Rouge, the 
Government there permitted the Women's Hospital 
Corps to establish themselves in what had been 
Claridge's Hotel in the Champs Elysees. In the 
course of time rumours reached the British War 
office of this soldiers' hospital in Paris run by Eng- 
lish women. Oh, well, of course, women surgeons 
might do for French -poilus. At length it was 
learned however that even the British Tommies were 
falling into their hands. And Sir Alfred Keogh, 
director of the General Medical Council, was hurried 
across to see about it. 

"Miss Anderson," he addressed the surgeon in 
charge, "I should like to look over the institution." 

"Certainly," she acquiesced. "But it's Dr. An- 
derson, if you please." Three times as they went 
through the wards, he repeated his mistake. And 
three times she suggested gravely, "Dr. Anderson, 
if you please." 

They had finished the rounds. "This," he said, 
"is remarkable, 'er quite remarkable, don't you know. 
But may I talk with some of your patients pri- 
vately?' 

Then the soldiers themselves, British soldiers, as- 



DR. ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON 

The first woman physician in England and after Dr. Elizabeth 

Hlackwell of America the next woman of modern times to prac- 
tise medicine. 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 257 

sured him of their complete satisfaction with the 
surgical treatment they had received. Indeed the 
word, they said, was out in all the trenches that the 
Women's Hospital was the place to get to when a 
man was wounded. Women surgeons took more 
pains, they were less hasty about cutting off arms 
and legs, you see. Oh, the Women's Hospital was 
all right. 

"Extraordinary, most extraordinary," murmured 
Sir Alfred Keogh. And this report he carried back 
to the General Medical Council. "Incredible as it 
may seem, gentlemen," he announced gravely, "it 
seems to be so." 

"It appears then," brusquely decided Kitchener, 
"that these women surgeons are too good to be 
wasted on France." And promptly their country 
and the War Office invited them to London. It was 
England's crack regiment after the great drive on 
the Somme that was tucked under the covers for 
repairs at Endel Street. The issue was no longer in 
doubt. "Major" Anderson and the Women's Hos- 
pital Corps held the fort for the professional wom- 
an's cause in England. 

WINNING ON THE FRENCH FRONT 

Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangaii, fascinating little 
French feminist, meanwhile was executing a brilliant 
coup in demonstration to her government. France, 
it was true, had seen that British women could be 
military doctors and surgeons. But the French 
woman doctor, oh, every one was sure that the French 



258 WOMEN WANTED 

woman doctor's place was the home. And if ever 
there was a woman whom God made just to be "pro- 
tected," you'd say positively it was Nicole Gerard- 
Mangin. 

She stood before me as she came from her oper- 
ating room, curling tendrils of bright brown hair 
escaping from the surgeon's white cap set firmly on 
her pretty head, a surgeon's white apron tied closely 
back over her hips accentuating all their loveliness 
of line. She is soft and round and dainty and 
charming. She has small shapely hands, as ex- 
quisitely done as if modelled by a sculptor. I looked 
at her hands in the most amazement, the hands that 
have had men's lives in their keeping, little hands 
that by the sure swift skill of them have brought 
thousands of men back from death's door. You'd 
easily think of her as belonging in a pink satin bou- 
doir or leading a cotillion with a King of France. 
And she's been at the war front instead. "Madame 
la petite Major" she is lovingly known to the sol- 
diers of France. She too has that rank. You will 
notice on one of the sleeves of her uniform the gold 
stripe that denotes a wound and on her right pink 
cheek you will see the scar of it. On her other coat 
sleeve are the gold bars for three years of military 
service. 

This was the way it happened. In August, 1914, 
Dr. Gerard-Mangin was in charge of the tubercu- 
losis sanitarium, Hopital Beaugou, in Paris. When 
the call came for volunteers for army doctors, she 
signed and sent in an application, carefully omitting 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 259 

however to write her first name. The War Office, 
hurrying down the lists, just drafted Dr. Gerard- 
Mangin as any other man. One night at twelve 
o'clock her concierge stood before her door with a 
government command ordering the doctor to report 
at once at the Vosges front. The next morning with 
a suit case in one hand and a surgeon's kit in the 
other, she was on her way. The astonished military 
medecin-en-chef , before whom she arrived, threw up 
his hands: "A woman surgeon for the French 
army ! It could not be." 

She held out her government order: "N'est ce 
pas?" He examined it more closely. "But yet," 
he insisted, "it must be a mistake." 

"En ce moment" as they say in France, a thou- 
sand wounded soldiers were practically laid at the 
commander's feet — and he had only five doctors at 
hand. He turned with a whimsical smile to the toy 
of a woman before him. After all there was an 
alertness, an independent defiance of her femininity 
that straightened at attention to duty now every 
curving line of the little figure. His glance swept 
the wounded men: "Take off your hat and stay a 
while," he said in desperation. "But," he added, 
"I shall have to report this to the War Office. 
There must be an investigation." 

Three months later when the Inspector General 
of the French army arrived to make it, he learned 
that Dr. Gerard-Mangin had performed six hundred 
operations without losing a single patient. "You'll 
do even though you are not a man," he hazarded. 



260 WOMEN WANTED 

A little later she was ordered to Verdun to or- 
ganise a hastily improvised epidemic hospital. For 
the first week she had no doctors and no nurses. 
There was no equipment but a barracks and the beds. 
As fast as these could be set up, a patient was put 
in. There were no utensils of any kind but the tin 
cans which she picked up outside where they had 
been cast away by the commissary department when 
emptied of meat. There was no heat. There was 
no water in which to bathe her patients except that 
which she melted from the ice over an oil lamp. 
For six weeks she worked without once having her 
clothing off. One of her feet froze and she had to 
limp about in one shoe. Eventually medical aid ar- 
rived and she had a staff of twenty-five men under 
her direction. There were eight hundred beds. 
For seventeen months the hospital was under shell 
fire. There were officers in the beds who went mad. 
Three hundred and twenty-nine panes of glass 
were shattered one day. A man next the little 
doctor fell dead. A piece of shell struck her 
but she had only time to staunch the flow of 
blood with her handkerchief. Outside the Ameri- 
can ambulance men were coming on in their steady 
lines. They delivered to Nicole Gerard-Mangin 
18,000 wounded in four days, whom she in turn gave 
first aid and passed on to interior hospitals. Later 
when 150,000 French soldiers were coming back 
from the army infected with tuberculosis, the Gov- 
ernment required its greatest expert for the diagnosis 
of such cases. And Dr. Gerard-Mangin in the fall 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 261 

of 1916 was recalled from the front to be made 
medecin-en-chef of the new Hopital Militaire 
Edith Cavell in the Rue Desnouettes, Paris. It is a 
group of low white buildings with red roofs. The 
white walls inside are ornamented above the pa- 
tients' beds with garlands of red and blue and yellow 
flowers. And the commanding officer's own gay lit- 
tle office has curtains of pink flowered calico. Grey 
haired French scientists in the laboratories here are 
taking their orders from Madame la petite Major. 
Soldiers in the corridors are giving her the military 
salute. One day there came a celebrated French 
general: "When I heard about you at Verdun," 
he said, "I could not believe it. I insisted, she can- 
not be a surgeon. She is only a nurse. I have made 
the journey all the way to Paris," he smiled in can- 
dour, "to find out if you are real." 

The records of the War Office show how real. 
Dr. Gerard-Mangin did her two years' service at the 
front without a day off for illness and never so much 
as an hour's absence from her post of duty. She is 
the only surgeon with the French army who has such 
a record. Her right to a place in the profession in 
which no man has been able to equal, let alone sur- 
pass, her achievement, would seem to be assured be- 
yond question. Let us write high on the waving 
banners carried by the cohorts of the woman's cause 
the name of Nicole Gerard-Mangin. It was not a 
simple or an easy thing that she has done. You 
would know if you heard her voice tremulous yet 
with the agony on which she has looked. "I shall 



262 WOMEN WANTED 

nevair forget! I shall nevair forget!" she told me 
brokenly, in the gay little pink calico office. And 
the beautiful brown eyes of the little French major, 
successful army surgeon, were suddenly suffused 
with woman's tears. 

WHAT SCOTTISH WOMEN DOCTORS DID 

Like this the woman war doctor began. Before 
the first year of the great conflict was concluded, 
there was not a battle front on which she had not 
arrived. And the Scottish Women's Hospitals have 
appeared on five battle fronts. Organised by the 
Scottish Federation of the National Union of Wom- 
en's Suffrage Societies and supported by the entire 
body of constitutional suffragists under Mrs. Fawcett 
of London, they afford spectacular evidence of how 
completely the forces of the woman movement of 
yesterday have been marshalled into formation for 
the winning of the new woman movement of to-day. 
Dr. Elsie Inglis 1 the intrepid leader of the Scottish 
Women's Hospitals, like a general disposing her 
troops to the best strategic advantage, has literally 
followed the armies of Europe, placing her now in- 
dispensable auxiliary aid where the world's distress 
at the moment seems greatest. There have been at 
one time as many as twelve of the Scottish hospitals 
in simultaneous operation. Sometimes they are 
forced to pick up their entire equipment and retreat 
with the Allies before the onslaught of the Hun 
hordes. Sometimes they have been captured by 

1 Died 1917. 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 263 

the enemy, only eventually to reach London and 
start out once more for new fields to conquer. 

These women in the grey uniforms with Tartan 
trimmings and the sign of the thistle embroidered 
on their hats and their epaulets, have crossed the 
vision of the central armies with a frequency that 
has seemed, to the common soldier at least, to par- 
take of the supernatural. Bulgarian prisoners 
brought into the Scottish Women's Hospital operat- 
ing at Mejidia on the Roumanian front looked up 
into the doctors' faces in amazement to inquire: 
"Who are you*? We thought we had done for you. 
There you were in the south. Now here you are in 
north. Are you double?" Of this work in the 
north, in the Dobrudja from where they were 
obliged to retreat into Russia, the Prefect of Con- 
stanza said in admiration : "It is extraordinary how 
these women endure hardship. They refuse help 
and carry the wounded themselves. They work like 
navvies." 

At the very beginning of the war, the Scottish 
women left their first record of efficiency at Calais. 
Their hospital there in the Rue Archimede, oper- 
ated by Dr. Alice Hutchinson, had the lowest per- 
centage of mortality for the epidemic of enteric 
fever. In France the hospital at Troyes under Dr. 
Louise McElroy was so good that it received an 
official command to pick up and proceed to Salonika 
to be regularly attached to the French army, this 
being one of the very few instances on record where 
a voluntary hospital has been so honoured. The 



264 WOMEN WANTED 

Scottish Hospital under Dr. Francis Ivins, estab- 
lished in the deserted old Cistercian abbey at Royau- 
mont, is one of the show hospitals of France. When 
the doctors first took possession of the ancient abbey 
they had no heat, no light but candles stuck in bot- 
tles, no water but that supplied by a tap in the holy 
fountain, and they themselves slept on the floor. 
But eventually they had transformed the great 
vaulted religious corridors into the comfortable 
wards of Hopital Auxiliarie 301. They might, the 
French Government had said, have the "petite 
blesse" They would be entrusted with operations 
on fingers and toes! And every week or so, some 
French general ran down from Paris to see if they 
were doing these right. But within two months the 
War Office itself had asked to have the capacity 
of the hospital increased from 100 to 400 beds. 
And the medical department of the army had been 
notified to send to Royaumont only the "grande 
blesses." At the end of the first week's drive on 
the Somme, all of the other hospitals were objecting 
that they could receive no more patients : their over- 
worked staffs could not keep up with the operations 
already awaiting them in the crowded wards. 
"But," said the French Government, "see the Dames 
du Royaumont ! Already they have evacuated their 
wounded and report to us for more." 

It was in Serbia that four Scottish hospitals be- 
hind the Serbian armies on the Danube and the Sava 
achieved a successful campaign in spite of the most 
insurmountable difficulties. Here under the most 




MISS NANCY NETTLEFOLD 

Leader in the campaign to admit women to the practise of law 

in England. 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 265 

primitive conditions of existence, every service from 
bookkeeping to bacteriology, from digging ditches to 
drawing water was done by women's hands. It was 
not only the wounded to whom they had to minister. 
They came into Serbia through fields of white pop- 
pies and fields of equally thick white crosses over 
fresh graves. They faced a country that was over- 
come with pestilence. All the fevers there are raged 
through the hospitals where patients lay three in a 
bed, and under the beds and in the corridors and 
on the steps and on the grass outside. After months 
of heartbreaking labour when the plague had finally 
abated, the enemy again overran Serbia and the 
Scottish Women's Hospitals, hastily evacuating, re- 
treated to the West Moravian Valley. Some of the 
doctors were taken prisoners and obliged to spend 
months with the German and Austrian armies before 
their release. Others joined in the desperate under- 
taking of that remarkable winter trek of the entire 
Serbian nation fleeing over the mountains of Monte- 
negro. Scores perished. But the Scottish women 
doctors, ministering to the others, survived. Dr. 
Curcin, chief of the Serbian medical command, has 
said: "As regards powers of endurance, they were 
equal to the Serbian soldiers. As regards morale, 
nobody was equal to them. In Albania I learned 
that the capacity of the ordinary Englishwoman for 
work and suffering is greater than anything we ever 
knew before about women." 

Like that the record of the woman war doctor runs. 
Where, oh, where are all those earlier fabled dis- 



266 WOMEN WANTED 

abilities of the female sex for the practice of the 
profession of medicine*? A very celebrated English 
medical man, returning recently from the front, 
found a woman resident physician in charge of the 
London hospital of whose staff he was a particularly 
distinguished member. In hurt dignity, he promptly 
tendered his resignation, only to be told by the 
Board of Directors practically to forget it. And he 
had to. 

Why man, you see you can't do that sort of thing 
any more! Yesterday, it is true, a woman physi- 
cian was only a woman. To-day her title to her 
place in her profession is as secure as yours is. Seven 
great London hospitals that never before permitted 
so much as a woman on their staff, now have women 
resident physicians in charge. Five of them are 
entirely staffed by women. The British Medical 
Research Commission is employing over a score of 
women for the highly scientific work of pathology. 
When one of those Scottish Women's Hospitals on 
its way to Serbia was requisitioned for six weeks to 
assist the British army at Malta where the wounded 
were coming in from Gallipoli, the authorities there, 
at length reluctantly obliged to let them go, decided 
that the Malta military hospitals in the future could 
not do without the woman doctor. They sent to 
London for sixty of her. And the War Office read- 
ing their report asked for eighty more for other 
military hospitals. By January, 191 5", professional 
posts for women doctors were being offered at the 
rate of four and five a day to the London School of 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 267 

Medicine for Women, and they hadn't graduates 
enough to meet the demand ! 

Like that the nations have capitulated. The 
woman physician's place in Europe to-day is any 
place she may desire. Russia, which before the war, 
would not permit a woman physician on the Petro- 
grad Board of Health because its duties were too 
onerous and too high salaried for a woman, had by 
1915 mobilised for war service even all of her 
women medical students of the third and fourth 
years. France has Dr. Marthe Francillon-Lobre, 
eminent gynecologist, commanding the military hos- 
pital, Ambulance Maurice de Rothschild in the Rue 
de Monceau, Paris. In Lyons the medecin-en-chef 
of the military hospital is Dr. Thyss-Monod who 
was nursing a new baby when she assumed her mili- 
tary responsibilities. Everywhere the woman doctor 
rejected of the War Office of yesterday is now 
counted one of her country's most valuable assets. 
And so precious is she become to her own land, that 
she may not be permitted to leave for any other. 
"Over there" the governments of Europe have ceased 
to issue passports to their women doctors. 

You of the class of 1921, you go up and occupy. 
Medical associations will no longer bar you as in 
America until the seventies and in England until the 
nineties. Salaried positions will not be denied you. 
Clinical and hospital opportunities will not be closed 
to you. You of to-day will no more be elbowed and 
jostled aside. You will not even be crowded out 
from anywhere. For there is room everywhere. Oh, 



268 WOMEN WANTED 

the horror and the anguish of it, room everywhere. 
And every day of the frightful world conflict they 
are making more of it. Great Britain alone has sent 
10,000 medical men to the front. America, they 
say, is sending 35,000. 

Hurry, hurry, urges this the first profession in 
which the women's battalions have actually arrived 
as it hastily clears the way for you. The New York 
Medical College and Hospital for Women, not to 
be outdone by any institution now bidding for wom- 
en's favour, has rushed up an "emergency" plant, 
a new $200,000 building. The London School of 
Medicine has erected a thirty thousand pound addi- 
tion and the public appeal for the funds was signed 
by Premier Asquith himself. The nations to-day are 
waiting for the women who shall come out from the 
colleges equipped for medical service. 

A PLACE IN EVERY PROFESSION 

And after the most arduous profession of all, how 
about the others? If a woman can be a doctor at a 
battle front, how long before she can be a doctor 
of divinity 4 ? At the City Temple in London on a 
Sunday in March, 1917, a slender black robed figure 
preceded an aged clergyman up the pulpit steps. 
With one hand resting on the cushioned Bible she 
stood silhouetted against the black hanging at the 
back of the pulpit, her face shining, illumined. By 
the time that the white surpliced choir had ceased 
chanting "We have done those things that we ought 
not to have done," the ushers were hanging in the 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 269 

entrance corridor the great red lettered signs "Full." 
The house was packed to the last seat in the gal- 
lery to hear Miss Maude Royden, one of England's 
leading suffragists, "preach." This church is nearly 
300 years old and only once before, when Mrs. Booth 
of the Salvation Army was granted the privilege, 
has a woman ever spoken from its pulpit. Some six 
months since, Maude Royden has now been ap- 
pointed pulpit assistant at the City Temple, the first 
woman in England to hold such a position. Dr. 
Fort Newton, the pastor, in announcing the innova- 
tion, declared: "We want the woman point of 
view, the woman insight and the woman counsel." 
The City Temple is not an Episcopalian Church. 
But even the established church has recently heard an 
archbishop cautiously pronounce the opinion that 
"we may invite our church women to a much larger 
share in the Christian service than has been usual." 
You see there are 2000 English clergymen enrolled 
as chaplains at the front. Laywomen were last 
year permitted to make public addresses in the Na- 
tional Mission of Repentance. They thus ascended 
the chancel steps. A committee of bishops and 
scholars — and one woman — has now been appointed 
to see how much farther women may be permitted 
to go on the way to the pulpit itself. A few of 
the smaller churches in America have a woman min- 
ister in charge. But from the arduous duties of the 
highest ecclesiastical positions women in all lands 
are still "protected." High established places are 
of course the last to yield. Theology continues to 



270 WOMEN WANTED 

be the most closed profession. But Maude Royden 
in the pulpit of the London City Temple, the high- 
est ecclesiastical place to which a woman anywhere 
in the world has yet attained, has, we may say, cap- 
tured an important trench. 

In the field of science the opposing forces are 
even more steadily falling back before the advanc- 
ing woman movement. One of the most conserva- 
tive bodies, the Royal Astronomical Society of Eng- 
land, has added a clause to its charter permitting 
women to become fellows. The Royal Institute of 
British Architects has also decided to accept women 
as fellows and in 1917 the Architectural Association 
for the first time opened its doors to women students. 
Germany even has several women architects em- 
ployed in military service, among them Princess 
Victoria of Bentheim. Russia, in 1916, admitted 
women to architecture and engineering. 

Chemistry is distinctly calling women in all lands. 
Sheffield University, England, in 1916 announced 
for the first time courses in the metallurgical depart- 
ment for training girls as steel chemists to replace 
young men who have been "combed out" of Shef- 
field's large industrial works. Firms in Leeds, 
Bradford and South Wales are filling similar vacan- 
cies with women. Bedford College of London Uni- 
versity had last year started a propaganda to induce 
young women to study chemistry. In 1916 there 
were some twelve graduates in the chemical depart- 
ment and the college received applications from the 
industrial world for no less than 100 women chemists. 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 271 

So insistent was the demand that even Woolwich 
Arsenal was willing to take a graduate without wait- 
ing for her to get her degree. Women are wanted 
too in physics and bacteriology. A London Univer- 
sity woman has been appointed to a position at the 
National Physical Laboratory at Teddington and 
there were last year, at this one university, offers of 
twenty positions for women physicists that could not 
be filled. All over the world now, in trade journals 
are beginning to appear advertisements for women 
chemists and physicists. 

Even in the teaching profession there is the record 
of new ground won. Women have of course oeen 
longest admitted to this the poorest paid profession, 
and in it they have been relegated to the poorest paid 
places. But now over in Europe, note that one- 
third of all the masters in the German upper high 
schools are enlisted in the army and with the consent 
of the Department of Education women are for the 
first time being appointed to these places, in some 
instances even at the same salaries as were received 
by the men whom they replace. Russia had in the 
first year of the war opened the highest teaching po- 
sitions in that country to women, by a special act of 
the Duma providing that "their salaries shall equal 
those of men in the same position." Russia also in 
1915 had her first woman college professor, Mme. 
Ostrovskaia, occupying the chair of Russian history 
at the University of Petrograd. In 1916 Mile. 
Josephine Ioteyko, a celebrated Polish scientist, had 
been invited to lecture at the College de France in 



272 WOMEN WANTED 

Paris. In 1917 Germany had its first woman pro- 
fessor of music, Fraulein Marie Bender, at the Royal 
High School of Music in Charlottenburg. And in 
the same year England had appointed its first woman 
to an open university chair, when Dr. Caroline Spur- 
geon was made professor of English literature at 
Bedford College. 

In each country like this, where the opposing pro- 
fessional lines begin to show a weakened resistance, 
surely, sometimes silently, but irresistibly and inevi- 
tably, the new woman movement is taking posses- 
sion. Next to medicine the legal profession, one 
ma^ say, is at present the scene of active operations. 
The woman movement in law, as in medicine, began 
for all the world in the United States. It was in 
1872 that one Mrs. Myra Brad well of Chicago 
knocked at the tight shut doors of the legal profes- 
sion in the State of Illinois. Of course her request 
was refused. Public opinion blushed that a woman 
should be guilty of such effrontery, and the learned 
judges of the court rebuked the ambitious lady with 
their finding that: "The natural and proper timid- 
ity which belongs to the female sex unfits it for many 
of the occupations of civil life. And the harmony 
of interests which belong to the family institution 
is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a dis- 
tinct and independent career from that of her hus- 
band." Syracuse University, which gave to the 
world the first woman physician, also graduated 
Belva A. Lockwood, who in 1879 was tne ^ rst 
woman to be permitted to practise law before the 




Albert Wyndham, Paris 



MME. SUZANNE GRINBERG 

Celebrated woman lawyer of Paris who pleads cases before the 

Conseil de la Guerre. The privilege thus accorded the French 

women lawyers marks an epoch in history. It is the first time 

in the world that women have conducted cases before a military 

tribunal. 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 273 

Supreme Court of the United States. Every State 
but Virginia has now admitted women to the prac- 
tice of law. There are something over 1000 women 
lawyers in the United States. Their way in and 
their way up has been attended with the same diffi- 
culties that women encountered just about a genera- 
tion ahead of them in the medical profession. The 
University of Michigan was one of the first institu- 
tions to admit women to its law school on the same 
terms as men. The Women's Law class at New 
York University was started in the nineties. Many 
law colleges, as Boston, Buffalo and Cornell, have 
since opened their doors. It was in 1915 that Har- 
vard University announced the Cambridge Law 
School, the first graduate law school in America ex- 
clusively for women, and the only graduate law 
school open to them in the East. 

But opportunities for professional advancement 
for women in law have been exceedingly limited. 
It is on the judge's bench, in every land, that their 
masculine colleagues have most stubbornly refused 
to move up and make room. So it is noteworthy 
that Georgiana P. Bullock was in 1916 made a 
Judge of the Woman's Court in Los Angeles, the 
first tribunal of its kind in the world. A few women 
have been allowed a place as judges in the children's 
courts. Catherine Waugh McCulloch of Chicago, 
who some years ago as justice of the peace was the 
first woman anywhere in the world to have arrived 
at any judicial office, scored another victory in De- 
cember, 1917, when she was made a master in chan- 



274 WOMEN WANTED 

eery, the first woman to receive such an appointment. 
Litta Belle Hibben, deputy district attorney in Los 
Angeles in 1915, and Annette Abbot Adams, assist- 
ant United States district attorney in San Francisco 
in the same year, were the first women to arrive at 
these appointments. Helen P. McCormick, in 1917 
assistant district attorney in New York, is the first 
woman in the more conservative East to become a 
public prosecutor. There is a reason for this ad- 
vance. Could a woman really be accepted as an 
expert in the interpretation of laws, so long as she 
was permitted no share in making them ? With the 
pressure of the woman movement at the gates of 
government resulting in enfranchisement, that 
handicap of civic inferiority is being removed. 

Like this even in the United States farthest from 
the war zone, the rear guard of the women's lines in 
the legal profession are moving. At the front "over 
there," every country reports distinct progress. 
Even a deputation of Austrian women have been to 
their department of state to demand admission to 
the legal profession. In October, 1917, on a peti- 
tion from the German Association of Women Law- 
yers, the Prussian Ministry of Justice made the first 
appointment of women in the Central Berlin law 
courts, three women having legally qualified there 
as law clerks. In Russia directly after the revolu- 
tion one of the first reforms secured by the Minister 
of Justice was the admission of women lawyers to 
the privilege of conducting cases in court on equal 
terms with the men of the profession. The Italian 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 275 

Parliament in 1917 passed a bill granting to women 
in that country the right to practise law. 

Specially significant is the legal situation in Eng- 
land, the land where Chrystabel Pankhurst, denied 
the opportunity to practise law, became instead a 
smashing suffragette. Now, see the vacant places 
in the London law courts where day by day women 
clerks are appearing with all of the duties, though 
not yet the recognition, as solicitors. And the Eng- 
lish Parliament at last is considering a bill which 
shall permit women to be admitted to this branch 
of the legal profession in England. This bill really 
should be known as Nancy Nettlefold's bill. The 
year that Nancy Nettlefold arrived at her twenty- 
first birthday and was presented at court, Cambridge 
University announced in June, 1912, that she had 
taken the law tripos, her place being between the 
first and second man in the first class honours list. 
And she at the time determined to make the winning 
of the legal profession her contribution to the wom- 
an's cause. With four other English women, who 
have also passed brilliant law examinations, she has 
financed and worked indefatigably in the campaign 
to that end. To-day they have that conservative 
organ of public opinion, the London Times, urging 
in favour of their case: "Many prejudices against 
women have been shattered in this war. And there 
is no stronger theoretical case against the woman 
lawyer as such than against the woman doctor." 
The bill permitting women to enter the Law Society 
has passed a second reading in the House of Lords, 



276 WOMEN WANTED 

Lord Buckmaster, its sponsor, declaring: "The 
true sphere of a woman's work ought to be measured 
by the world's need for her services and by her ca- 
pacity to perform that work." 

And the world's need presses steadily, inexorably 
day by day. France had called 1500 men lawyers 
to the colours when the War Office sent a brief 
notice to the bar association of Paris : "On account 
of the absence of so many men at the front," read 
the summons, "women lawyers are wanted in the 
Ministry of War." Women have been in the legal 
profession in France since 1900. There are 52 
women lawyers in Paris. But their practice has 
been limited largely to women clients. Madame 
Miropolsky has made a reputation as a divorce law- 
yer. Madame Maria Verone is the prominent bar- 
rister of the Children's Court. A year ago I heard 
Avocat Suzanne Grinberg plead a case before a 
tribunal which up to 1914 had never listened to a 
woman's voice. 

As she stood there in the ancient Palais de Justice 
of Paris, her small, well formed head wound round 
with its black braid, her red lips framing with easy 
facility the learned legal phrases, her expressive 
hands accentuating her points with eager gesture, 
her woman's figure in the flowing legal robe of black 
serge with the white muslin cravat, was outlined 
against a thousand years of history. Eight soldiers 
with bayonets stood on guard at the rear of the room. 
The court whom she addressed was seven judges of 
military rank in splendid military uniform. And 




DR. ROSALIE SLAUGHTER MORTON OF NEW YORK 

Who is organizing the American women physicians for war 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 277 

her client was a soldier. This is the Conseil de la 
Guerre. See the epitage, the sash that falls from 
Suzanne Grinberg's left shoulder. It is edged with 
ermine, the sign that she is entitled to plead before 
the Tribunal of War. It is the first time in the his- 
tory of the world, here in France, that women law- 
yers have been empowered to appear in military 
cases. The Salle de Pas-Perdus, they call the great 
central promenade at the Palais de Justice. Note 
that these new women lawyers who wear the ermine 
walk in the Hall of Lost Footsteps ! On the walls 
of this court house in which Suzanne Grinberg 
pleads, you may read wreathed in the tricolours of 
France, "Avocals a la Cour d'Appel de Paris Morts 
pour la Patrie" and there follow 127 names. 

Only the day before yesterday woman's capacity 
for the higher education to fit her for the professions 
was in grave doubt. Vassar College once stood as 
the farthest outpost of radical feminism, and Chris- 
tian women were counselled by their clergymen not 
to send their daughters there. Even after the moral 
stigma of a college education had passed, the critics 
said that anyhow the female mind was not made to 
master science and Greek and mathematics. And it 
was only about twenty years ago that Phi Beta 
Kappa decided to risk the opening of its ranks to 
college women — of course provided that any of them 
should be able to attain the high scholarship that it 
required. The female mind, you know ! 

Well, at the last Phi Beta Kappa council meeting, 
the secretary reported to that distinguished body that 



278 WOMEN WANTED 

in the elections of the past three years, women have 
captured in Phi Beta Kappa an aggregate of 1979 
places to 2202 for men. What shall the oldest col- 
lege fraternity do in the face of this feminine inva- 
sion? A letter on my desk says that the committee 
on fraternity policy has been commissioned to take 
under advisement this grave situation and report to 
the council meeting of 1919! So the present Phi 
Beta Kappa record seems to dispose forever of the 
old tradition of the mental inferiority of the always 
challenged sex. 

Ladies, right this way for titles, please, one pro- 
fession after another takes up the call to-day. New 
York University at its opening last fall registered 
110 women in its law school, the largest number 
ever entered there. Already the American medical 
women are called and coming. New York City has 
recently appointed women doctors for nearly every 
municipal institution. The first mobile hospital 
unit of American women physicians with a hospital 
of 100 beds, to be known as the Women's Oversea 
Hospital Unit, is now in France. It is backed 
financially by the National Women's Suffrage Asso- 
ciation. And it goes from that first original outpost 
of the professional woman's cause, Elizabeth Black- 
well's New York Infirmary for Women and Chil- 
dren. Meanwhile the entire Medical Women's Na- 
tional Association is being organised for war service 
under the direction of Dr. Rosalie S. Morton, who 
has been made a member of the General Medical 
Board of the United States Government at Wash- 



IN THE PROFESSIONS 279 

itfgton. The American Women's Hospitals are 
being formed for civilian relief at home and for 
service with Pershing's army. From the Surgeon 
General's headquarters in Washington the announce- 
ment is made: "There will be need for the war 
service of every woman physician in the United 
States." 

And through the vast Salle de Pas-Perdus of the 
world, the professional women are passing. The 
Lost Footsteps ! O, the Lost Footsteps ! Forward 
the advancing columns. Hush, there are ways that 
are not our ways ! On with the new woman move- 
ment, but with banners furled before the woe of a 
world! For all the paeans of our victory are 
drowned in the dirge of our grief. 



CHAPTER VIII 

At the Gates of Government 

The man in khaki stood at the door. And he 
held a woman close to his heart in mansion or cot- 
tage — in a rose bowered cottage on the English 
downs, or red roofed behind the yellow walls of 
France and Italy, or blue trimmed beside a linden 
tree in Germany, or ikon-blessed in Russia. All 
that he had in the world, his estates, his fields or his 
vineyards, his flocks or his factory, his shop or his 
job, his home and his children, he was leaving be- 
hind. "I leave them to you, dear," he said. 

The bugles blew. And he kissed her again. 
Then he went marching down the street in those fate- 
ful days of August, 1914, when all the world began 
going to war. 

So in land after land she took up the trust and 
the burden that the man who marched away had 
left her, to "carry on" civilisation. It was the 
woman movement that was to be under the flags of 
all nations. Ours too now flies behind the battle 
smoke. A little while since and our men com- 
menced to stand in khaki on our front porches, then 
went down the front walk to join the long brown 

lines passing along Main Street on their way to 

280 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 281 

France. At Washington they told us why it had 
to be. 'They were going," the President himself 
explained, "to fight for Democracy, for the right of 
those who submit to authority, to have a voice in 
their own government." In the name of liberty, we 
too pass under the rod. But we fall in line to catch 
step with the women's battalions of the world. We 
shall see them moving triumphantly even on the 
very strongholds against which the woman's cause 
of yesterday dashed itself most vainly. 

The tasks of the world were one by one being 
handed over to women by men who were taking up 
arms instead. By solemn proclamation of church 
and state, the patriotic duty of thus releasing every 
possible citizen for military service was profoundly 
impressed on the women of every nation. Only 
there was still one function that no country was 
asking them to assume. In England a thoughtful 
woman filling in her registration paper stating the 
national service that she could render, wrote down 
her qualifications like this: "Possessed of a per- 
fectly good mentality and a University training, 
prepared to relieve a member of Parliament who 
wishes to go to the front." 

But the lady wasn't called. Whole brigades of 
women swung out across the threshold of the home 
into industry. Regiment after regiment went by 
into commerce. Companies passed into the profes- 
sions. Cohorts even crossed the danger zone for 
duty right up to the firing line. But government 
was still reserved for men. Could a woman vote*? 



282 WOMEN WANTED 

O, my lords, the legislative hall was not woman's 
place ! 

Then the armies of Europe got into action. Even 
as their primitive forefathers had done, the men of 
the modern world came together to put liberty to 
the test of the sword. They fight for the freedoms 
their leaders have formulated — and for another 
they did not know and did not understand. A free- 
dom that was enunciated from Holloway jail and 
turbulently contested in London streets is also being 
fought to a finish in front line trenches even along 
the Somme and the Aisne and the Yser. 

Sergeant Jones of Company C of the 14th regi- 
ment of the Cold Stream Guards was a combatant. 
He was a British soldier bravely defending his flag 
against, the Huns. And he found himself up against 
a great deal more that his enemies also equally face, 
the most revolutionary force that the world has ever 
known in this Great War that is overturning the 
destinies and opinions of individuals and the decrees 
of the social order as lightly and as easily as the 
dynasties of kings. 

Sergeant Jones was bowled completely over. A 
German bullet hit him, and another and another. 
For weeks thereafter he was wandering on the 
borderlands of death. At length he was drifting 
back to earth in a roseate blur of warmth and soft 
comfort. Slowly his mind began to establish again 
the realities of existence. The roseate blur straight- 
ened away and away from beneath his chin: it was 
the cherry red comforter that covered his bed at 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 283 

Endcl Street Hospital, London. Rip Van Winkle 
himself came back with no more wonderment. The 
sergeant awoke, a soldier literally in the hands of 
women. 

He couldn't so much as bathe his own face. A 
woman in a white headdress, with a red cross in the 
centre of her forehead, was doing it for him. When 
he opened his eyes again, a girl orderly in a blue 
tunic was saying, "You can smoke if you want to." 
And she began propping pillows softly about his 
shoulders. There was a queer numb feeling along 
his side. He couldn't find his right hand. "Never 
mind," the girl said hastily. She placed the ciga- 
rette between his lips and held the lighted match. 
He smoked and began to remember that he had gone 
over the top. He pulled gently again for his right 
hand. He tried to draw up his left leg. At the 
least movement, somewhere outside the numb, tight 
bound area of him, there were answering stabs and 
twinges of pain. He wanted to flick the ashes from 
his cigarette. As he turned his head and his left 
hand found the tray on the little bedside stand, he 
glimpsed a long row of cherry red comforters that 
undulated in irregular lines. From where he lay, 
he could see still, white faces, bandaged heads, an 
arm in a sling, a man in a convalescent uniform 
clumsily trying out crutches. The man in the very 
next bed to his own lay moaning with face upturned 
to the light, hollow, empty, staring sockets where 
the eyes had been. In the bed beyond was a man 
with his face sewed up in an awful twisted seam 



284 WOMEN WANTED 

that was the writhing caricature of the agony that 
had slashed it. A sickening sensation of nausea 
swept over the sergeant. God in heaven, he 
thought, then how much was the matter with him? 

A woman was coming down the room, pausing 
now and then by the side of a cherry red comforter. 
By the waving mass of her red brown hair, she was 
a woman, but not such as the sergeant had seen 
before. His mother wore a black dress and his 
wife's, he remembered, was a blue silk for Sundays 
and at home, why he supposed it was calico beneath 
their gingham aprons. But this woman was in 
khaki as surely as ever he had been. 

Now she reached his bed. She stood looking 
down on him with an air of proprietorship, almost 
of possession. "How are you, this morning, Ser- 
geant Jones?" she asked, with firm professional 
fingers reaching authoritatively for the pulse in his 
left wrist. Without waiting for a reply, she was 
proceeding calmly to turn back the covers. "We 
have a little work to do here, I think," she said, 
gently grasping — could the sergeant be sure — it 
seemed to be his left leg. "The dressings, you 
know," she was saying easily. 

"But, but, 'er — the doctor," he gasped in protest. 

"I am the doctor," she answered. 

Of the female of the species, Sergeant Jones of 
course had heard. He had never before seen one. 
"I'll be — " he started to say. But he wasn't. 
Then he would have jerked away. But he couldn't. 
"I want a doctor, a real one," he blurted out angrily. 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 285 

A shadow of a smile flickered for an instant in 
the woman's eyes. Often she had seen them like 
this. "I am the surgeon in charge, the commanding 
military officer here," she replied evenly. "After 
awhile, I'm sure you won't mind." 

She went quietly on unwinding him. He heard 
her scissors snip. She was going to take some 
stitches. Once or twice she had to hurt horribly. 
She did it with deft precision. With the same quick 
motions, the sergeant had seen his wife at home roll 
out a pudding crust or flap a pancake. It was the 
convincing sureness of the woman who knows her 
business. Could a woman be a doctor, after all 4 ? 
The strips of linen had piled in a blood stained heap 
on the floor. With an effort the sergeant steadied 
his voice : "What is there left of me?" he asked. 

The doctor smoothed his pillow first. "Ser- 
geant," she said very gently, "you have one perfectly 
good arm. I think there will be one leg. Last 
week the other — " But the sergeant did not have 
to hear the rest of the sentence. When he struggled 
back from somewhere in a black abyss, the hand 
that last week had held the surgeon's knife was 
softly smoothing back the damp locks of hair from 
his cold forehead. She drew the cherry red com- 
forter up and patted it about his shoulders with the 
infinite sympathy that speaks in a woman's touch. 
She leaned over him with a glance that signalled 
courage and understanding. Then she left him to 
fight the fight he had to fight in the grim grey light 
of that London day for his own readjustment to the 



286 WOMEN WANTED 

cruelty of existence. Was he glad that a woman 
was a doctor? She had saved his life. 

There were weeks of convalescence. The hos- 
pital librarian in khaki stopped beside his cherry 
red comforter. He turned his face to the wall. 
There was nothing she could do for him. But in 
time he came to watch for her on her rounds as he 
did for the doctor. Finally he asked for books and 
magazines and the papers. And the news of the day 
that she brought him, flared with just two topics, 
War and Woman. The one was man's universal 
activity, the other was his Great Discovery. You 
know how pleased a boy is with a Christmas toy he 
finds will go with some new unexpected action? 
Women were in all kinds of unprecedented action. 



The girl orderly in the blue tunic dressed Ser- 
geant Jones one day for the convalescent soldiers' 
outing. A girl chauffeur of the Woman's Reserve 
Ambulance Corps picked him up in her arms like a 
child and set him on the seat beside her and took 
her place at the wheel. Could a woman drive a car? 
She shot hers in and out of the tangled maze of the 
London traffic as«easily as a girl he had seen send 
a croquet ball through a wicket. Other cars 
whizzed by with women at the wheel. Great motor 
vans, with a woman on the high driver's seat, swung 
safely past. Fleets of motor busses came careening 
along with girl conductors in short skirts balancing 
jauntily in command on the rear platforms. The 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 287 

bus marked "Woolwich Special" drew up at the 
Haymarket curb to take on a load of women muni- 
tion workers going out for the night shift at the 
great arsenal. High on a ladder against a building 
here in Cockspur Street, two girl window cleaners 
stand at work in tunic and trousers. Girl footmen 
are opening the doors of carriages before the fashion- 
able shops of Oxford Street. Girl operators are 
running the lifts. Girl messengers in government 
uniform are going in and out of Whitehall. 

A kingdom is in the hands of its women. Round 
and round the world has turned since yesterday. 

Here in Trafalgar Square a crowd of a thousand 
people hang on the words that a woman is speaking. 
Jones had never heard Mrs. Pankhurst; he had for- 
bidden his wife to when she came to their town. 
Rampant, women's rights females were against the 
laws of God and England. This, the arch conspira- 
tor of them all, he pictured in his mind's eye as per- 
manently occupied in burning country residences and 
bombing cathedrals and engaging in hand to hand 
conflicts with the London police. 

Now wouldn't it take your breath away? Here 
she was doing nothing at all of the kind. A very 
well gowned lady stood directly between the British 
lions, her slender figure outlined against the statue 
of Nelson. Her clear, ringing tones carried over the 
listening throng to Jones and his comrades in the 
Women's Reserve Ambulance car. One small hand 
frequently came down into the palm of the other in 
the emphatic gesture that in times past brought two 



288 WOMEN WANTED 

continents to attention. It is the hand that hurled 
the stone that cracked the windows of houses of gov- 
ernment around the world. 

To-day, as England's most active recruiting agent, 
the greatest leader of the woman's cause is calling 
men to the colours to win the war. Had she once 
a slogan, Votes for Women? 'Tis a phrase forgot. 
In the public squares of London since the war, her 
countrymen have heard from Mrs. Pankhurst only 
"Work for Women." Round and round, you see, 
the world has turned. 

A puzzled Sergeant Jones asked the next day for 
a book about the woman movement. It was Olive 
Schreiner's "Woman and Labour" the librarian in 
khaki brought him. "But I wanted to know about 
the suffragettes, the suffragettes. Did you ever hear 
of them?" he questioned. So Rip Van Winkle 
might have asked, I suppose, why, say, for women 
who once wore hoop skirts. 

The woman beside the hospital bed smiled in- 
scrutably for an instant. "Sergeant," she said with 
a level glance, "I was one, a militant, Sergeant," 
she added evenly. "And the doctor was in Hollo- 
way jail, and your nurse. And the girl who drove 
your car yesterday was a hunger striker and — " 
She stopped. The truce! By the pact that was 
signed in Kingsway, the most radical suffragists in 
the world, along with all the others, were war work- 
ers now in their country's cause and not their own. 

The woman in khaki was still. Jones stared. 
She was dropping no bombs. Only the armies were 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 289 

smashing. Nothing about here was broken but men 
— and women were mending them ! 

At length they had the sergeant patched up as 
well as they could. He would never again work at 
his skilled trade. But they pinned a medal for 
valour on his coat lapel. And they sent him back to 
his wife in the north of England. The woman who 
met him at the door fell on her knees: "My dear, 
my dear!" She gathered him from a wheel chair 
into her arms with a sob. The man who had gone 
out in khaki was home again. 

"Mustered out of the service," his papers read. 
But his wife will never be ! 

Mustered out of service. So was the man with 
the twisted face, who never again can smile. And 
so was the man with the blinded eyes, whose little 
daughter on sunny days leads him to the Green Park 
where he sits on a bench and talks to the squirrels. 
Just so I have seen him sitting in the Gardens of the 
Tuileries. Just so he sits in the Tiergarten by the 
side of the River Spree. He is going to be "re-edu- 
cated" to keep chickens. And Sergeant Jones shall 
learn basket weaving for a living! Oh, and there 
are thousands of others ! 

After each great drive on the front, they are pass- 
ing through the hospitals to the cottage rose bowered 
and red roofed, to the blue trimmed cottage and the 
ikon blessed cottage. And now they are waited for 
in plain little white houses where a woman on the 
front porch shades her eyes with her hand to look 
down Main Street as far as she can see. And it 



290 WOMEN WANTED 

isn't the woman who can fall on her knees and gather 
her burden to a hungry heart whose shoulders will 
bear the heaviest load. It is the woman whose arms 
are empty never again to be filled ! 

These are the women whom not even the peace 
treaty will discharge from their "national service." 
Every Great Push makes more of them. And the 
rest must always watch fearfully, furtively looking 
down Main Street as the years of strife wear on. 
Who shall say whether she too may be conscripted 
to "carry on" for life. For this is the way of war 
with women. 

Like this, the trust and the burden have rested 
heavier and heavier on woman's heart and hands. 
Millions of men will never be able to lift it for her 
again. No one knows when the others will. Men 
must fight and women must work. 

So many men are with the flag at the front. So 
many men are under the crosses, the acres of crosses 
with which battle fields are planted. So many men 
are in wheel chairs and on crutches. Women are 
carrying on in the home, in industry, in commerce 
and in the professions. Then why not in the State? 

Little by little, in every land, a voice began to be 
heard. It was the voice of the man with the flag, 
and the man with the twisted face, and the man 
with the blinded eyes, and the voice of Sergeant 
Jones. It said what the sergeant said, when from 
his wheel chair by the window where his wife had 
placed it, he took his pen in hand and wrote back to 
Endel Street hospital : "Women are wonderful. I 




MRS. MILLICENT GARRETT FAVVCETT OF LONDON 

For fifty years leader of the Constitutional Suffragists, whose 

cause triumphed in 1918 when Parliament granted the franchise 



to English women. 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 291 

didn't know before. Now I wouldn't be afraid for 
you even to have the vote." 

And curiously enough, what the man in the wheel 
chair and the man in the Green Park and the Tui- 
leries and the man with the flag was saying, the 
newspapers began to repeat as if it had been syndi- 
cated round the world. The Matin had it in Paris, 
the Times in London and the Tageblatt in Berlin. 
You read it in all languages: "The women are 
wonderful. We didn't know before." 

GREATEST DRIVE FOR DEMOCRACY 

Then couldn't a woman who could cast a shell, 
cast a vote"? Parliaments trembled on the verge of 
letting her try. 

It wouldn't be at all the difficult undertaking it 
used to look to those women of yesterday, whose 
place was in the home pouring afternoon tea or em- 
broidering a flower in a piece of lace. Why, to-day 
they would scarcely have to go out of their way at 
all to the polls! They could just stop in as easily 
as not, as they went down the street to their day's 
work in shop and office and factory. Sergeant 
Jones's wife is out of the home now anyway from 
six o'clock in the morning until seven at night mak- 
ing munitions. Some one must support her family, 
you know. Well, all over the world a new call 
began. Simultaneously in every civilised land, 
through the crack in the window of the government 
house where man gathered with his fellow man, you 
could hear it. In some lands yet it is only a mur- 



2Q2 WOMEN WANTED 

mur of dissent. But in many lands now it is a rising 
chorus of consent : "Women wanted in the counsels 
of the nation !" 

At the gates of government, the new woman 
movement has arrived. And not through the broken 
window is it entering in. Without benefit of even 
a riot, suffrage walking very softly and sedately is 
going through an open door. In England, a gentle- 
man holds it ajar, a gentleman suave and smiling 
and bowing the ladies to pass ! 

Democracy, the right of those who submit to au- 
thority to have a voice in their own government, is 
breaking through apparently on all the fronts at 
once. It is a most remarkable coincidence. In 
August, 1917, Parliament in England removed the 
"grille," the brass lattice barring the ladies' gallery 
in the House of Commons and symbolising what had 
been the English woman's position. The Times, 
commenting on the proceeding, characterised it as a 
"domestic revolution." In the same month in India 
5000 Hindus were applauding Shimrati Pandita 
Lejjawati who at Jullundur had come out on a pub- 
lic platform to urge that her country abolish purdah ! 

But the great drive for Democracy that now 
thrills around the world at the International Suf- 
frage Alliance headquarters, began unmistakably in 
Britain. Mrs. Pankhurst in the old days never 
staged a raid on the houses of Parliament more spec- 
tacularly. Just see the gentleman bowing at the 
open door! It is Mr. Asquith, the former leader 
who for years held the Parliamentary line against 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 293 

all woman's progress. And smiling right over his 
shoulder stands Mr. Lloyd George, the present 
premier. Oh, well ! The girl in the green sweater 
who horsewhipped one member of Parliament, at the 
Brighton races, is driving a Red Cross ambulance in 
Flanders. The quiet little woman in a grey coat, 
who fired the country house of another in 1912, is 
rolling lint bandages. Sergeant Jones's wife has be- 
come a bread winner. Soldiers are not afraid for 
women to vote. And cabinet ministers take cour- 
age! 

There is a town in the north of England with a 
monument erected to a shipwrecked crew: "In 
memory of 17 souls and 3 women," says the marble 
testimonial. That categorical classification to which 
the English ivy clings is about to be changed. Six 
million English women are about to be made peo- 
ple! ! 

At the outbreak of hostilities, politicians the world 
over hastened to declare woman's suffrage a "contro- 
versial" question that must be put aside during the 
war. And every government engaged said to its 
suffragists: "We're in so much trouble, for heav- 
en's sake don't you make us any more." 

"Well, we won't," the women agreed, as the or- 
ganisations in land after land called off their politi- 
cal campaigns. It was for his sake — the man in 
khaki. And in every land, the trained women of 
the suffrage societies assembled their countrywomen 

1 Bill passed by House of Lords and received King's sanction, Feb. 
6, 1918. 



294 WOMEN WANTED 

to stand ready with first aid for him. Day by day, 
week after week, now year after year, they have been 
feeding the nation's defenders, clothing them, nurs- 
ing them, passing up ammunition to them. To-day 
there isn't an army that could hold the field but for 
the women behind the men behind the guns. 

In England Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, presi- 
dent of the National Union of Women's Suffrage 
Societies, had been a member of the committee that 
in 1866 sent up to Parliament the first petition for 
the enfranchisement of women. She had been a girl 
of twenty then. It was a cause, you see, to which 
she had given a lifetime, that she now laid aside. 
With the summons, "Let us show ourselves worthy 
of citizenship," she turned 500 women's societies 
from suffrage propaganda and Parliamentary peti- 
tioning to hospital and relief work. 

But it was when Mrs. Pankhurst, the dramatic 
leader of the Woman's Social and Political Union 
who had first smashed suffrage into the front page 
of the newspapers of all nations, lay down her arms 
to give her country's claims precedence above her 
own, that the world realised that there was a new 
formation in the lines of the woman movement. 

Emmeline Pankhurst was on parole from Hollo- 
way jail recuperating from a hunger strike, when 
there came to her from her government the overtures 
for a peace parley. When the authorities offered 
her release for all of the suffragettes in prison and 
amnesty for those under sentence, she ran up the 
Union Jack where her suffrage flag had been. In 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 295 

no uncertain terms she announced in Kingsway, "I 
who have been against the government, am now for 
it. Our country's war shall be our war." 

For a minute after that proclamation, you could 
have heard a pin drop in the great assembly hall of 
the smashing suffragettes. Then in a burst of ap- 
plause she had them with her: they would follow 
their leader. Some few at first drew back in con- 
sternation. Had their late leader lost her mind? 
The girl in the green sweater looked dazed : "I was 
in the front ranks of her body guard when we 
stormed Buckingham Palace," she murmured. A 
very few were angry : "She's selling out the cause," 
they exclaimed bitterly. 

But she wasn't. The greatest little field marshal 
the woman movement has ever known, was leading 
it to final victory. 

When Kitchener announced, "We shall not be 
able to win this war until women are doing nearly 
everything that men have done," it was the woman 
who had organised raids on Parliament who now 
organised the woman labour of a nation. On the 
day that she led 40,000 women down the Strand to 
man the factories of England and turned Lincoln's 
Inn House, her headquarters in Kingsway, into a 
munitions employment bureau, opponents of the 
woman's cause the world over began an orderly re- 
tirement from their front line trenches. The next 
morning the London Post announced: "We stand 
on the threshold of a new age." 

We do. You see, you could not have practically 



296 WOMEN WANTED 

the men of all nations in arms for Democracy with- 
out their finding it. And some of them who buckled 
on their armour to go far crusading for it, are com- 
ing to the conviction that there is also Democracy to 
be done at home. When the history of these days 
at length is written, it will come to be recorded that 
the right of women to have a voice in the govern- 
ment to whose authority they submit, was practically 
assured by the events of 1917. 

In that year, the women who came to petition the 
English Parliament for citizenship, got what they 
had for fifty years been asking in vain. For the 
women who with Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Fawcett 
and Mrs. Despard of the Women's Freedom League 
now stood at the gates of government were: women 
shell makers and howitzer makers, pit brow lassies, 
chain makers, textile workers, railway engine clean- 
ers, women motor lorry drivers in khaki, women let- 
ter carriers, women window cleaners, women bus 
conductors, women engineers, women clerks, women 
in the civil service, women tailors, women bakers, 
women bookbinders, women teachers, women army 
nurses, women army doctors, women dentists, women 
chemists, and women farm labourers. Among them 
was the wife of the man with the twisted face and 
the wife of the man with the blinded eyes and the 
wife of Sergeant Jones. 

The capitulation of the English Government was 
assured in the recantations of its greatest men. Ex- 
premier Herbert H. Asquith spoke first: "I my- 
self," he declared, "as I believe many others, no 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 297 

longer regard the woman suffrage question from the 
standpoint we occupied before the war. ... I have 
said that women should work out their own salva- 
tion. They have done it. The woman's cause in 
England now presents an unanswerable case." 

Mr. Lloyd George agreed: "The place of 
woman," he said, "is altered for good and all. It 
would be an outrage not to give her the vote. The 
further parliamentary action now involved may be 
regarded as a formality." 

General French, former commander of the British 
armies, the brother of Mrs. Despard and of Mrs. 
Harley who died at the front, crossed the Channel 
to announce his conversion to the woman's cause 
through "the heroism, the endurance and the organ- 
ising ability of the women on the battlefields of 
France and Belgium." 

The press of the country burst into print with a 
new confession of faith. The Observer declared: 
"In the past we have opposed the claim on one 
ground and one ground alone — namely, that woman 
by the fact of her sex was debarred from bearing a 
share in national defence. We were wrong." 
The Daily Mail: "The old argument against giv- 
ing women the franchise was that they were useless 
in war. But we have found out that we could not 
carry on the war without them." The Evening 
News: "In the home woman has long been a part- 
ner — not always in name, perhaps, but generally in 
practice. Now she is a partner in our national ef- 
fort. And if she demands a partner's voice in the 



298 WOMEN WANTED 

concerns of the firm, who shall say her Nay'?" The 
Northern Daily Telegraph: "The duties of citizen- 
ship are fulfilled by women to the uttermost. The 
continuance of the sex disqualification would be a 
cruel crime and a blind folly as well." The Ref- 
eree: "Women have earned a right to be heard in 
the nation's councils. The part they have played in 
winning the war is their victory." 

Like this, the cause that yesterday was rejected 
and most bitterly assailed of men was now champi- 
oned by the nation. This was a kingdom saying 
Votes for Women. Field Marshal Pankhurst 
would never again have to. Her wartime strategy 
had won. When Mr. Asquith rose in the House of 
Commons himself to move the woman's suffrage reso- 
lution, it had ceased to be a "controversial" question. 
The measure was passed by an overwhelming ma- 
jority. 

RECORD YEAR EOR SUFFRAGE CAUSE 

The domestic reform that was begun in England 
has echoed round the world. See that which had 
come to pass in 1917: Four other nations, France, 
Italy, Hungary and the United States had suffrage 
measures before their parliaments. Members of the 
Reichstag were warning that Germany cannot avoid 
it if she would keep up in efficiency with the rest of 
the world. King Albert announced that it should 
be one of his first acts for a restored Belgium to con- 
fer citizenship on its women. Holland and Canada 
have just accomplished it in limited measure. Rus- 




MME. CHARLES LE VERRIER 

One of the feminist leaders in Paris to whose appeal for votes 

for women the French government is listening today. 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 299 

sia and Mexico in the throes of revolution have ac- 
tually achieved it. Women have for the first time 
taken their seats in the governing bodies of three 
nations, Hermila Galindo in the Congress of Mexico, 
Mrs. McKinney and Lieutenant Roberta Catherine 
McAdams in Canada and Jeanette Rankin in the 
United States. A woman, the Countess Sophia 
Panin, has been a cabinet minister in Russia. And 
for the first time since civilisation began, a woman, 
Dr. Poliksena Shiskina Yavein, as a member of the 
Council of 61 at Petrograd, has assisted in writing 
a nation's constitution. 

On with Democracy ! Nations are convinced that 
those who serve their country should have a voice in 
directing its destinies. Land after land preparing to 
extend its franchise for soldiers, as England with her 
Representation of the People Bill, is reflecting on a 
real representation. For every country is finding 
itself face to face with the question with which 
Asquith first startled Britain, "Then what are you 
going to do with the women 4 ?" Everywhere at the 
gates of government are deputations like that in 
England who are saying, "We also serve who stand 
behind the armies. We too want to be people." 

And some one else wants them to be. From the 
training camps to the trenches, the supporting column 
of the man in khaki stretches. Every knitted 
sweater, every package of cigarettes tied with yellow 
ribbon has been helping votes for women. And now 
over there he is getting anxious about his job or his 
home or his children. What can he know at the 



3 oo WOMEN WANTED 

front about food control or the regulation of school 
hours in Paris or London or New York? And when 
there are decisions like that to be made, "I'd like to 
leave it to Her," the soldier is beginning to conclude. 
Why, war time is the time for women to be free! 
The whole world is athrill with the new ideal. 

See the lines of women arriving before the gov- 
ernment houses. Theresa Labriola voices the de- 
mand of the National Federation in Italy: 
"Women," she says, "form the inner lines of defence 
for the nations. We need the ballot to make our 
lines strong." Yes, yes, agrees her country. You 
shall begin right away with the municipal franchise. 
And Premier Boselli and the Italian Parliament are 
proceeding to get it ready. 

In France, Mme. Dewitt Schlumberger and Mme. 
Charles LeVerrier for the Union Franchise pour le 
Suffrage des Femmes, present the "unanswerable 
case." The senate on the Seine, looking out, sees 
many women wearing long crepe veils in the delega- 
tion before its doors. "Let us give them," says a 
member of the Chamber of Deputies in a burst of 
poetic chivalry, "the suffrage de la morte: every sol- 
dier dying on the battle field shall be permitted 
to designate the woman relative he wishes to have 
carry on his citizenship for him." Very gently the 
women of France declined the suffrage of the dead. 
Presenting a carefully prepared brief that was the 
review of their war work, they said, "We can vote 
for ourselves, please." And who else shall? 
There are whole communes with most of the men 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 301 

dead. There are villages with not so much as a man 
to be made mayor, and a woman filling the office in- 
stead. The French Chamber of Deputies has be- 
fore it a bill to confer the municipal franchise on 
women. "It is an act of justice," says ex-Premier 
Viviani. The Droit du Peuple declares, "After the 
war, many homes will be maintained by women who 
will perform men's tasks and fulfil men's obliga- 
tions. They ought to have men's rights." 

Canada, too, thought to reward her women with 
a vicarious vote. The "next of kin" franchise was 
devised, by which the Government has conferred on 
the wife or widow, mother, sisters and daughters of 
men in the service the right to vote. But the dele- 
gations of women outside the government house at 
Ottawa do not go away. They still wait. "We 
also serve," they repeat. And the country, in which 
no less than five provinces last year gave to all of 
their women full citizenship, has promised now to 
prepare the full direct federal franchise. 

In Mittel Europa, Rosika Schwimmer is marshal- 
ling the feminist forces. Under her leadership, a 
great deputation has marched to the Town Hall in 
Budapest. The resolution there presented for uni- 
versal suffrage was carried by the Burgomaster to 
the Emperor. In reply, the Hungarian Feminist 
Union has received the assurance of the prime minis- 
ter that the Government will introduce a measure 
extending the franchise to a limited class of women. 
At Prague, Austria, the Town Council has appointed 
a committee to draw up a new local government 



302 WOMEN WANTED 

franchise which shall include women. The free 
town of Hamburg, Germany, preparing to enlarge 
its franchise in recognition of the self-sacrifice of sol- 
diers, hears the voice of Helene Lange and 27,000 
women. They are reminding the Hamburg Senate 
that women, too, who have borne the burdens of war, 
will wish to devote themselves to reconstruction and 
in order to fulfil the duties of citizens, they claim 
citizens' rights. The Prussian Diet has before it 
the petition of Frau Minna Cauer and the Frauen- 
stimmrechtsbund urging that suffrage for women be 
included in the projected franchise reform. The 
Reichstag arranging a Representation of the People 
Bill has at last referred the petition of the Reich- 
verbund, the German National Union for Woman 
Suffrage, "for consideration" zur kennttsnahme, 
which is the first indication of their change of atti- 
tude before the women's offensive. The Socialists in 
the Reichstag are urging: "Women suffrage is 
marching triumphantly through other lands. Can 
Germany afford to fall behind the other nations, with 
her women less fully equipped than the rest for the 
struggle for existence 4 ?" Meanwhile, Germany, as 
other countries, is depending more and more upon 
her women. Two leading cities, Berlin and Frank- 
fort-on-Main, both have women appointed to their 
municipal committees. Frau Hedwig Heyl, that 
woman behind the food control policy for the 
Empire, who has turned her great chemical factory 
on the Salzufer to canning meat for the army, says: 
"Woman suffrage in Germany is a fruit not yet ripe 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 303 

for the picking. I water the tree," she adds sig- 
nificantly. 

Holland has seen in The Hague 4,000 women as- 
sembled in the Binnehof, the public square before 
the House of Parliament. On their behalf, Dr. 
Aletta Jacobs, president of the Vereenigingvoor 
Vronwenkeisrecht, presented to Premier Cort Van 
der Linden a petition with 164,696 signatures, asking 
for citizenship for women. "Society," Dr. Jacobs 
told him, "can only gain when the forces and energy 
of its women, now concentrated on the struggle for 
the vote, can be used along with men's in finding 
a solution for the many social problems for which 
the insight of both is necessary." And the Dutch 
Parliament, making over its Constitution to enlarge 
the franchise for men, decided on the amazing plan 
about women, "We will try them first, as members 
of Parliament. And if we find they can make the 
laws, afterward we shall let them vote for law 
makers." So the new Dutch constitution gives to 
women the "passive" franchise, which is the right to 
hold all administrative offices, including representa- 
tion in Parliament. There is also removed an old 
prohibitory clause, so that the way is now clear for 
the introduction of a measure for the "active" fran- 
chise for women — if it is found the dinner doesn't 
burn while they are sitting in Parliament. 

A South African Party Congress, for the first time 
it has ever listened to women, has received a delega- 
tion who urge: "Half the population of the coun- 
try is composed of women. Can you any longer 



3 04 WOMEN WANTED 

afford to do without our point of view in your 
national deliberations?" The Grand Council of 
Switzerland is considering a bill which is before it, 
proposing to give women the franchise in communal 
affairs. Mexico is struggling toward national free- 
dom with her women at the side of her men. It 
was not even considered necessary to incorporate in 
the new constitution the woman suffrage provision 
suggested by Hermila Galinda at the national con- 
vention. The new Mexican Federal constitution 
states explicitly that "Voters are those Mexicans who 
are 21 if unmarried and over 18 if married and pos- 
sessed of an honest means of livelihood." And 
under this constitution, in the March, 1917, elec- 
tions, Mexican women quietly voted as a matter of 
course along with the other citizens. 

In all of Russia's turbulent revolutionary unrest, 
none of the divers parties struggling for supremacy 
there, denies the claim of half the race to the free- 
dom which it is hoped ultimately to establish. The 
Provisional government's first announcement was for 
universal suffrage. But the Russian women weren't 
going to take any chance. They remembered a 
French revolution that also proclaimed "universal" 
suffrage and has not yet done anything of the kind. 
The Russian League for the Defence of Women's 
Rights said, "Let's be certain about this. We want 
our calling to citizenship made sure." So Dr. Shis- 
kina Yavein, the president of the League, led 45,000 
women to the Imperial Duma in Petrograd. As 
their spokesman she told the government : "At this 







DR. P0L1KSENA SHISKINA YAVEIN 

Who led 45,000 women to the duma in Petrograd to make their 

calling to citizenship sure. 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 305 

time of national crisis we should have no confusion 
of terms. Without the participation of women, no 
franchise can be universal. We have come for an 
official declaration concerning the abolition of all 
limitations with regard to women. We demand a 
clear and definite answer to two questions: Are 
women to have votes in Russia 4 ? And are women 
to have a voice in the Constituent Assembly which 
only in that case can represent the will of the people ? 
We are here to remain until we receive the answer." 

Well, the answer came. It was an unconditional 
affirmative, received in turn from the men who came 
out from the government house to reply to the wait- 
ing women : M. V. Rodzianko, president of the Im- 
perial Duma; N. S. Tchkeidze, president of the 
Council of Workingmen's and Soldiers' Deputies, 
and Prince LvofF, president of the Council of Minis- 
ters. And when the preliminary parliament of the 
Russian Republic was opened at Petrograd in Octo- 
ber, 1917, the chair was offered to Madame Bresh- 
kovsky, the celebrated "Little Grandmother" of the 
Russian Revolutionaries, as the senior member of 
the council. 

In New York City on election night of November, 
1917, the newsboys shrilled out a new cry, "The 
wimmin win !" "The wimmin win !" It was like a 
victory at Verdun or the Somme. The cables 
throbbed with the news that New York State, where 
the woman movement for all the world began ninety 
years before, had made its over three million women 
people. It is now only a question of time when all 



306 WOMEN WANTED 

other American women will be. New York State 
carries with it almost as many electoral votes as all 
of the 17 previous States combined, which have con- 
ferred on women the Presidential franchise. The 
strongest fortress of the opposition is fallen. And 
President Wilson has already recommended women 
suffrage to the rest of the States as a war measure 
for immediate consideration. 

It was from the hand of Susan B. Anthony that 
the torch of freedom was received by every leader of 
the woman movement now carrying it. On her 
grave at Rochester, N. Y., we have already laid the 
victory wreath. For Democracy, the right of women 
to have a voice in the government to whose authority 
they submit, is about to be established in the earth! 

"One thing that emerges from this war, I feel 
absolutely convinced," (it is Mr. Lloyd George, 
Premier of England, who is speaking in a public ad- 
dress), "is the conviction that women must be ad- 
mitted to a complete partnership in the government 
of nations. And when they are so admitted, I am 
more firmly rooted than ever in the confident hope 
that they will help to insure the peace of nations 
and to prevent the repetition of this terrible condi- 
tion of things which we are now deploring. If 
women by their enfranchisement save the world one 
war, they will have justified their vote before God 
and man." 

There is a story that the anti-suffragists started. 
But it's our best suffrage propaganda now. A 
farmer's wife in Maine, who had cooked the meals 



AT THE GATES OF GOVERNMENT 307 

and swept the house, and washed the children and 
sent them to school, and hoed the garden and fed 
the chickens, and worked all the afternoon in the 
hayfield, and was now on her way to the barn to 
finish her day's work with the milking, was accosted 
by an earnest agitator, who asked her if she didn't 
want the vote. But the farmer's wife shook her 
head : "No," she answered, "if there's any one lit- 
tle thing the men can be trusted to do alone, for 
heaven's sake, let 'em!" 

But is there*? From the rose bowered cottage, the 
cottage red roofed and the blue trimmed cottage and 
the ikon blessed cottage, and the plain little white 
house somewhere off Main Street, there is a rising to 
the question. 

Lest we forget, this war was made in the land 
where woman's place was in the kitchen ! 

And the mere housewifely mind asks, Could con- 
fusion be anywhere worse confounded than in the 
government houses of the world to-day? 

Hark ! You cannot fail to hear it ! The cry of 
the nations is now sharp and clear. It is the cry of 
their distress: "Women wanted in the counsels of 
state." 



CHAPTER IX 
The Rising Value of a Baby 

You unto whom a child is born to-day, unto you 
is this written. I bring you glad tidings. Blessed 
are you among the nations of the earth. Wise men 
all over the world are hurrying to bring you gifts. 
Only lift your eyes from the baby at your breast 
and in your mirror I am sure you shall see the shining 
aureole about your head. Exalted are you, O, 
woman among all people. Know that you have be- 
come a Most Important Person. Governments are 
getting ready to give your job a priority it never had 
before. For you, why you are the maker of men ! 

The particular commodity that you furnish has 
been alarmingly diminished of late. It is clear what 
has happened with the present world shortage of 
sugar: we pay lie and 16c a pound where once we 
paid four. The world shortage in coal has increased 
its cost in certain localities almost to that of a prec- 
ious metal, so that in Paris within the year it has sold 
for $80 a ton. It is just as the political economists 
have always told us, that the law of supply and de- 
mand fixes prices. That which becomes scarce is 
already made dear. 

Thus is explained quite simply over the world to- 
day the rising value of a baby. Civilisation is run- 

308 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 309 

ning short in the supply of men. We don't know 
exactly how short. There are the Red Cross re- 
turns that say in the first six months alone of the war 
there were 2,146,000 men killed in battle and 1,150,- 
000 more seriously wounded. Figures, however, of 
cold statistics, as always, may be challenged. There 
is a living figure that may not be. See the woman in 
black all over Europe and to-morrow we shall meet 
her in Broadway. There are so many of her in every 
belligerent land over there that her crepe veil flutters 
across her country's flag like the smoke that dims the 
landscape in a factory town. It is the mourning 
emblem of her grief unmistakably symbolising the 
dark catastrophe of civilisation that has signalled 
Parliaments to assemble in important session. 
Population is being killed off at such an appalling 
rate at the front that the means for replacing it 
behind the lines must be speeded up without delay. 
To-day registrar generals in every land in white- 
faced panic are scanning the figures of the birth rates 
that continue to show steadily diminishing returns. 
And in every house of government in the world, 
above all the debates on aeroplanes and submarines 
and shipping and shells, there is the rising alarm of 
another demand. Fill the cradles ! In the defence 
of the state men bear arms. It is women who must 
bear the armies. 

Whole battalions of babies have been called for. 
If we in America have had no requisitions as yet, it 
is because we have not yet begun to count our cas- 
ualty costs. L' Alliance Nationale pour l'Accroisse- 



310 WOMEN WANTED 

merit de la Population Franchise is calling on the 
French mothers for at least four children apiece dur- 
ing the next decade. Britain's Birth Rate Com- 
mission wants a million new babies from Scotland 
alone. The Gesellschaft fur Bevolkerungs Politik, 
which is the society for increase of population organ- 
ised at a great meeting in the Prussian Diet House, 
has entered its order with the German women for a 
million more babies annually for the next ten years. 
And that is the "birth politics" of men. 

Then to the proposals of savants and scientists, 
sociologists and statesmen, military men and clergy- 
men and kings, there has been entered a demurrer. 
Governments may propose, Increase and multiply. 
She-who-shall-dispose overlays their falling birth 
rate figures with the rising death rate statistics. 
And there is tragedy in her eyes : "What," she asks, 
"have you done with my children*? The babies that 
I have given you, you have wasted them so!" 

Is it not true? Even now along with the war's de- 
struction of life on the most colossal scale known to 
history, children throughout the world are dying at 
a rate that equals the military losses. In England a 
hundred thousand babies under one year of age and 
a hundred thousand more that do not succeed in 
getting born are lost annually. In America our in- 
fant mortality is 300,000 a year. In Germany it is 
half a million babies who die annually. The econ- 
omics of the situation to a woman is not obscure. 
Conservation of the children we already have, is the 
advice of the real specialist in repopulation. One 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 311 

other suggestion she contributes. She has made it 
practically unanimously in all lands. In the Prus- 
sian Diet House it was one speaking with authority 
as the mother of eight who interpolated: "Meine 
Herren, if you would induce women to bring more 
children into the world you must make life easier 
for mothers." "Messieurs, Messieurs," called the 
Union Francaise pour le Suffrage des Femmes to the 
Societe pour la Vie with its curious proposal of 
money grants in reward to fathers of large families, 
"to get children, you must cultivate mothers!" 
"Gentlemen," declared the Duchess of Marlborough 
at a great public meeting on race renewal held in the 
Guild Hall, London, "care of the nation's mother- 
hood is the war measure that will safeguard the 
future of the state." 

These amendments in birth politics offered on be- 
half of the Most Important Person have been prac- 
tically adopted the world over. Chancellors of the 
Exchequer are everywhere busy writing off expendi- 
tures from the taxes running into millions, in support 
of nation-wide campaigns for the conservation of the 
child. Maternity from now on in every land takes 
the status of a protected industry. Britain is ready 
to devote two and one-half million dollars a year to 
schools for mothers. France has voted a "wards of the 
nation" bill, to provide for the care of 700,000 war 
orphans, at a cost to the state which it is estimated 
will mean an outlay of two hundred million dollars. 
Public provisions for motherhood and infancy are 
proceeding apace with provisions for the armies. If 



312 WOMEN WANTED 

you are going to have a baby in Nottingham, Eng- 
land, a public health visitor comes round to see that 
you are perfectly comfortable and quite all right. 
And the municipality that is thus anxiously watch- 
ing over your welfare solicitously inquires through a 
printed blank on which the reply is to be recorded, 
"Have you two nightgowns'?" In Berlin large signs 
at the subway and elevated stations direct you to 
institutions where rates are moderate, or even the 
Kaiser himself will be glad to pay the bill. Similar 
facilities are offered by the government of France in 
the "Guide des Services Gratuits Protegeant la 
Maternite," with which the walls of Paris are pla- 
carded. Even the war. baby, whose cry for atten- 
tion not all the ecclesiastical councils and the mili- 
tary tribunals commanding "Hush" has been able to 
still, at last is too valuable to be lost. And every 
Parliament has arranged to extend the nation's pro- 
tection on practically equal terms to all children, not 
excluding those we have called "illegitimate," be- 
cause somebody before them has broken a law. 

FINANCING MATERNITY 

You see, yesterday only a mother counted her 
jewels. To-day states count them too. Even Jim- 
mie Smith in, we will say, England, who before 
the war might have been regarded as among the 
least of these little ones, has become the object of 
his country's concern. Jimmie came screaming into 
this troublous world in a borough of London's East 
End, where there were already so many people that 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 313 

you didn't seem to miss Jimmie's father and some of 
the others who had gone to the war. Jimmie be- 
longs to one of those 300,000 London families who 
are obliged to live in one and two room tenements. 
Five or six, perhaps it was five, little previous 
brothers and sisters waited on the stair landing out- 
side the door until the midwife in attendance ushered 
them in to welcome the new arrival. Now Jimmie 
is the stuff from which soldiers are made, either sol- 
diers of war or soldiers of industry. And however 
you look at the future, his country's going to need 
Jimmie. He is entered in the great new ledger 
which has been opened by his government. The 
Notification of Births Act, completed by Parliament 
in 1915, definitely put the British baby on a business 
basis. Every child must now, within thirty-six 
hours of its advent, be listed by the local health 
authorities. Jimmie was. 

And he was thereby automatically linked up with 
the great national child saving campaign. Since 
then, so much as a fly in his milk is a matter of solici- 
tude to the borough council. If he sneezes, it's heard 
in Westminster. And it's at least worried about 
there. Though all the King's councillors and all 
the King's men don't yet quite know what they're 
to do with the many problems of infancy and com- 
plications of pregnancy with which they are con- 
fronted, now that these are matters for state atten- 
tion. 

A first and most natural conclusion that they 
reached, as equally has been the case in other lands, 



3H WOMEN WANTED 

was that the illness of babies was due to the ignorance 
of mothers. Well, some of it is. And that has 
proven a very good place to begin. For every one 
else, from a plumber to a professor, there has always 
been training. Only a mother was supposed to find 
out how by herself. Now she no longer has to. 
The registration of Jimmie's birth itself brought the 
Health Visitor, detailed from the public health de- 
partment of the borough, for her first municipal call 
on his mother. She found Mrs. Smith up and trying 
to make gruel for herself. After serious expostula- 
tion, the maternity patient was induced to return to 
bed, where she belonged. Gruel, the white-faced 
woman who sank back on the pillow insisted, was 
easy. Why, probably she should not have minded 
it at all. Only that day before yesterday she had 
gotten up to do a bit of wash and had fainted at the 
tub. She hadn't seemed to be just right since. 
Neither had the baby. 

The visitor leaned across the bed and removed a 
"pacifier" from the baby's mouth. "But he has to 
have it," said the mother, "he cries so much. All 
my children had it." Looking round at them, the 
visitor saw that it was true. Each exhibited some 
form of the facial malformation that substantiated 
the statement. And one was deaf from the ade- 
noid growth. And one was not quite bright. 
This was, of course, no time for a medical lecture 
beyond Mrs. Smith's comprehension. But the effort 
was made to impress her with the simple statement 
of fact that a pacifier really was harmful for a 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 315 

child. There were inquiries about the baby's feed- 
ing. No, of course, it was not being done scien- 
tifically. Well, the mother was told, if he were fed 
at regular intervals he would be in better condition 
not to cry all the time. And of course she herself 
must not get. tired. It was Mrs. Smith's first intro- 
duction to the practice of mothercraf t as an art. At 
the school for mothers recently opened in the next 
square, where the Health Visitor had her enrolled 
within a month, her regular instruction began. 

The schools for mothers are now being established 
as rapidly as possible throughout the country. It is 
not an absolutely new enterprise. The first one in 
England, from which all the others are being copied, 
had been started in London by an American woman 
who had married an Englishman, Mrs. Alys Russell, 
a graduate of Bryn Mawr. Women recognised at 
once the value of the plan. It was only a question 
of popularising and paying for it. This the war has 
accomplished. Government will now defray 50 per 
cent, of the cost of a school under the operation of 
either voluntary agencies or borough authorities. 
Already 800 schools have been opened. Some of 
the most successful are at Birmingham, Sheffield and 
Glasgow, under municipal direction. Parliament, 
you see, by financing it. has established the school for 
mothers as a national institution. 

The "infant consultation" is the feature about 
which its activities centre. Jimmie was taken regu- 
larly for the doctor's inspection and advice and there 
is on file there at the school a comprehensive 



316 WOMEN WANTED 

record in which is entered every fact of his family 
history and environment and his own physical con- 
dition, with the phenomena of its changes from week 
to week. The weekly weighing indicated very ac- 
curately his progress. And the week that his weary 
mother's milk failed, the scales reported it. The 
modified milk was carefully prescribed but the next 
week's weighing indicated that Mrs. Smith wasn't 
getting the ingredients together right. The Health 
Visitor was assigned to go home with her and show 
her just how. Like that, Jimmie was constantly 
supervised. When the doctor at the consultation, 
tapping the little distended abdomen with skilled 
fingers, announced, "This baby is troubled with 
colic," Mrs. Smith said he had been having it a good 
deal lately. Well, a little questioning corrected the 
difficulty. The trouble was pickles, and he never 
had them after that. Also he never had the summer 
complaint, which the former Smith babies always had 
in September. 

You see, there is no proper cupboard at Jimmie's 
house. There is only the recess beside the chimney, 
and flies come straight from the manure heap at the 
back of the house to the milk pitcher on the shelf. 
Mrs. Smith didn't know that flies mattered. She 
knows now, and at the school she has learned that 
you protect the baby from summer complaint by 
covering the pitcher with a muslin cloth. She also 
has learned how to make the most ingenious cradle 
that ever was contrived. It's constructed from a 
banana box, but it perfectly well serves the purpose 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 317 

for which it was designed. That Jimmie should 
sleep alone, is one of the primary directions at the 
school. Of course, it is clear that this is hygienically 
advisable, and there is another reason : these crowded 
London areas are so crowded that even the one bed 
the family usually possesses is also overcrowded. 
With some five other children occupying it with 
their mother, there was danger that Jimmie would 
some night be smothered. "Overlaying," as it is 
called, is the reason assigned in the death certificate 
for the loss of a good many London babies. 

BETTER BABIES ARE PRODUCED 

Jimmie in his banana cradle slept better than any 
of the other babies had. He had a little more air. 
Also he was cleaner than the others, because his 
mother had learned that dirt and disease germs are 
dangerous. But it is not easy, you should know, to 
keep children clean where every pint of water you 
wash them in must be carried up stairs from the tap 
on the first floor and down stairs again to the drain. 
A frequent bath all around in the one stewpan that 
perforce must serve for the purpose is out of the 
question. But there was a real wash basin now 
among the new household furnishings that Mrs. 
Smith was gradually acquiring. There are so many 
things that one goes without when one's husband is 
an ordinary labourer at the limit line of 18s. a week. 
But when he becomes a soldier and you get your 
regular separation allowance from the government, 
you begin to rise in the social scale. Mrs. Smith, 



318 WOMEN WANTED 

like so many others of the English working class 
women, now during the war was "getting on her 
feet." And some of the improvement in family life 
was certainly registering in that chart card at the 
school consultation that recorded Jimmie's progress. 

When his father, home from Flanders on furlough, 
held him on his knee, it was a better baby than he 
had ever held there before. For one thing it was a 
heavier baby : children in this district used to average 
thirteen pounds at one year of age. And now those 
whose attendance at the consultations is regular 
average sixteen and seventy-five hundredths pounds. 
Also Jimmie was a healthier baby. He hadn't 
rickets, like the first baby, who had suffered from 
malnutrition. What could you do when there was a 
pint of milk a day for the family and the baby had 
"what was left"? He hadn't tuberculous joints, 
like the second baby. He hadn't died of summer 
complaint, like the third and the fifth babies. And 
he hadn't had convulsions, like the seventh baby, 
who had been born blind and who fortunately had 
died too. Yes, when one counts them up, there have 
been a good many, and if some hadn't died, where 
would Mrs. Smith have put them all? The six that 
there are, seem quite to fill two rooms and the one 
bed. 

Still in the course of time there was going to be 
another baby. Governments crying, "Fill the 
cradles," seem not to see those that are already spill- 
ing over. But the development of birth politics has 
at last arrived at an important epoch — important to 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 319 

all the women in the world — in the recognition of 
the economic valuation of maternity. It has dashed 
acquiescent compliance in a world old point of view 
most tersely expressed in that religious dictum of 
Luther: "If a woman die from bearing, let her. 
She is only here to do it." Mrs. Smith will not die 
from bearing to-day if her government can help it — 
nor any other mother in any other land. Instead, 
all science and sociology are summoned to see her 
through. The rising value of a baby demonstrates 
clearly that you cannot afford to lose a maker of 
men. The British Government and the German 
Government and the French Government, speeding 
up population, are now taking every precaution for 
the protection of maternity. The mortality record 
for women dying in child birth in England has been 
about 6,000 a year. In Germany it has been 10,000. 
There was also in addition to this death rate a dam- 
age rate. The national health insurance plan in- 
augurated by several countries before the war was 
beginning to reveal it : the claims for pregnancy dis- 
abilities, the actuaries reported, were threatening to 
swamp the insurance societies. New significance 
was added to these phenomena when there began to 
be the real war necessity for conserving population. 
The Registrar General, laying the case before Par- 
liament in England, found it suddenly strengthened 
by a book presented by the Women's Co-operative 
Guild. The volume constitutes one of the most 
amazing documents that ever found a place in any 
state archives. It is entitled "Maternity," and is a 



320 WOMEN WANTED 

symposium constituting the cry of woman in travail. 
A compilation of 160 letters written by members of 
this working women's organisation recounting the 
personal experiences of each in childbirth, it reflects 
conditions under which motherhood is accomplished 
among the 32,00x3 members of the Guild. "Mater- 
nity," with its simple, direct annals of agony is a 
classic in literature, a human document recommended 
for all nations to study. The gentlemen in the 
House of Commons, who had turned its tragic pages, 
looked into each other's faces with a new under- 
standing: there was more than maternal ignorance 
the matter with infant mortality ! And a new popu- 
lation measure was determined on. 

"These letters" impressively announced the Right 
Honourable Herbert Samuel, "give an intimate pic- 
ture of the difficulties, the miseries, the agonies that 
afflict many millions of our people as a consequence 
of normal functions of their lives. An unwise reti- 
cence has hitherto prevented the public mind from 
realising that maternity presents a whole series of 
urgent social problems. It is necessary to take ac- 
tion to solve the problems here revealed. The con- 
clusion is clear that it is the duty of the community 
so far as it can to relieve motherhood of its burdens." 
So you will now find the maternity centre being 
erected next door to the school for mothers. The 
Government in 1916, announcing that it would as- 
sume also 50 per cent, of this expense, sent a circu- 
lar letter to all local authorities throughout the king- 
dom, urgently recommending the new institution "in 




HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH 
Formerly Consuelo Vanderbilt of New York, who is leading the 
movement in England for the conservation of the nation's child- 
hood. 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 321 

spite of the war need for economy at the present time 
in all other directions." 



STARTING THE BABY RIGHT 

Mrs. Smith was automatically registered from the 
school for mothers to the books of the maternity 
centre when the Health Visitor learned that it was 
time. The medical authorities report that 40 per 
cent, of the total deaths of infants occur within a 
month after birth and are due very largely to condi- 
tions determined by the state of the mother's health. 
A specific trouble is maternal exhaustion. Mrs. 
Smith, under weekly observation at the ante-natal 
clinic, was discovered to be hungry. She didn't 
know it herself, because she had so long been that 
way. It gets to be a sort of habit with the working 
class woman, who must feed her husband first, be- 
cause he is the bread winner. He has the meat and 
the children have the soup, and she is very likely to 
have the bread and tea. The clinic doctor, looking 
Mrs. Smith over, wrote out a prescription. It wasn't 
put up in a bottle. It was put on a plate. Mrs. 
Smith was to attend the mothers' dinner, served 
every day at the centre. The mother, being the 
medium of nourishment for the child, the good food 
that she would get here would do more than any dos- 
ing that might be done afterward to ensure the 
right kind of constitution for the coming little Brit- 
ish citizen. In the "pre-natal class," under the in- 
struction of a sewing teacher and with municipal 
patterns furnished by the city of London, she made 



322 WOMEN WANTED 

better baby clothes than she had ever had before. 
The materials, bought at wholesale, are furnished at 
cost price, the entire layette at 10s. to be paid for by 
a deposit of 6d. a week. 

As time went on, Mrs. Smith's headaches became 
more severe. Carrying water and coal upstairs 
greatly aggravated the heart trouble she had had 
since Jimmie's birth. Suddenly dizzy one day, she 
nearly fell from a chair on which she was standing 
to wash the windows. The next morning her feet 
were so swollen she could with difficulty get on her 
shoes. Her neighbour on the lower landing re- 
marked, " Of course, you'll have to be worse before 
you're better." And she herself knew no other way. 

But the ante-natal clinic did. The doctor wrote 
kidney trouble on her attendance card. That, of 
course, was the technical diagnosis. He might have 
said it another way had he written "overwork" and 
"overbearing." It was a long time since Mrs. Smith 
had been strong. She had nursed two of the chil- 
dren with measles right up to the day that the 
seventh had arrived. Three months later, with the 
eighth expected, she was going out charring. Her 
husband was out of work. The 30 shillings mater- 
nity benefit that would be coming to her from the 
national insurance department on the birth of her 
baby, would have to be supplemented somehow in 
order to meet all the additional expenses of the occa- 
sion. Well, the eighth baby was a miscarriage in- 
stead. Then there was the ninth, and then there 
was Jimmie, in quick succession. And with the five 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 323 

others and trying to keep up with all that she was 
learning at the school for mothers should be done for 
children, why it was more than one pair of hands 
was equal to. She had now reached the verge of col- 
lapse. 

The clinic doctor was telling her gravely that she 
must have medical attendance at once. The busi- 
ness of a centre is to supply supervision, but for 
medical treatment the patient is referred to her own 
physician. Mrs. Smith didn't have one. Half the 
babies of the kingdom are brought into the world by 
mid-wives. Mrs. Smith could not afford a doctor. 
Well, Parliament could. The bill, presented by the 
physician in whose care she was now placed, was paid 
half by the national government and half by the 
health department of this borough. It is an ar- 
rangement which is considered a good invesment by 
the national treasury. Without this aid Mrs. Smith 
would have died in convulsions and a new baby 
might never have been born. Careful feeding and 
careful doctoring obviated both disasters and carried 
the case to a triumphant conclusion. The baby is 
here. On his first birthday anniversary he tipped 
the scales at 20 pounds. 

Mrs. Smith counts it a confinement de luxe that 
brought him. For the first occasion in her maternal 
history she did not have to get out of bed to do the 
washing. For two weeks she just "laid up" while a 
Home Help took the helm in her household. The 
Home Help is an adaptable person in a clean blouse 
and a clean apron, who comes in each morning, and 



324 WOMEN WANTED 

cooks and scrubs, and washes, and gets the children 
off to school. Her wages of 13s. a week were paid 
half by the centre and half by Mrs. Smith through 
her weekly 6d. contribution to the Home Help 
Society. But there was a greater event than even the 
Home Help. A "bed to yourself to have a baby in," 
is the dream of luxury 7 to which the working class 
woman with her new war time allowance looks for- 
ward. Mrs. Smith, carefully saving out a shilling 
here from the "coal and lights," and another shilling 
there, perhaps, from "clothes and boots," painfully 
accumulating the little fund, had achieved the bed 
of her ambition. And neighbours from the length 
of the square and around the next turning came in to 
look at her as she lay in state, as it were, the new 
improved baby by her side. 

There are improved babies like Mrs. Smith's ar- 
riving every day in England. They are not all 
among the working class. They are reported with 
increasing frequency, as at Nottingham and Hud- 
dersfield, among the artisan class. Even compar- 
atively well-to-do mothers in the best of homes have 
not in the past been always accustomed to the skilled 
medical supervision during pregnancy which is now 
afforded without cost. It is Parliament's plan to 
have the new maternity service as available for the 
entire population as is public education for school 
children. The city of Bradford exhibits the ideal of 
a complete municipal system now in successful ope- 
ration: an infants' department occupying a new 
three-story building, with a consultation to which 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 325 

600 mothers come weekly; a maternity department 
with the ante-natal clinic; a maternity hospital, an- 
nounced as "the first of its kind" in the world; a 
staff of municipal midwives for service in the homes; 
a cooking depot, from which meals in heat-proof ves- 
sels distributed by motor vans are dispensed to 500 
expectant mothers daily; and a staff of 20 women 
health visitors to connect the homes of Bradford with 
all of this municipal maternity service. 

Still England's comprehensive scheme of assist- 
ance to mothers grows. Down the street, Mrs. Smith 
noticed one day another new institution that has 
been started. It is a municipal creche, for which the 
Government pays 75 per cent, of the cost of opera- 
tion. The sign in the window says that it is a 
nursery for the care and maintenance of the children 
of munition workers. Three meals are provided, 
and the charge is 6d. a day. Just around the corner, 
the Labour Exchange has out a sign, "8,000 women 
wanted at once for shell-filling factories. Age 16 to 
40. No previous experience necessary. Fill the 
factories and help to win the war." 

And Mrs. Smith is thinking. The school for 
mothers has taught her to. Do you know that the 
number of children who survive the first year in good 
health is 71 per cent, in homes where the wage in- 
come is over 20s. a week and it drops to 51 per cent, 
in homes where the wage income is less than 20s. a 
week*? The sociologists have also some very inter- 
esting figures that were compiled at Bradford. In 
1911 the infant mortality rate there in houses that 



326 WOMEN WANTED 

rented for six pounds and less was 163 in 1,000; 
house rent six to eight pounds, infant mortality, 
128; house rent eight to twelve pounds, infant mor- 
tality, 123; house rent over twelve pounds, infant 
mortality, 88. And here in London infant mor- 
tality is over 200 per 1,000 in one-room tenements, 
as compared with 100 in tenements of four rooms 
and upwards. Now, Mrs. Smith, I don't suppose, 
has ever seen those figures. But she doesn't need to. 
She understands why the small white hearse goes so 
continuously up and down some streets. She knows 
perfectly well that there will be more light and air 
for her children in three or four rooms than in two. 
Also that the rent will cost her 9s. 6d. a week, where 
now she pays 4s. 6d. But in a factory there are 
women earning 25 and 30s. a week, and even up to 
two pounds a week. Mrs. Smith is thinking. 

THE MADONNA IN INDUSTRY 

Meanwhile over in France Azalie de Rigeaux, at 
half-past ten this morning, will step aside from the 
lathe where she turns fuses, to retire for say half an 
hour for another service. Azalie de Rigeaux is a 
munitions worker in trousers in a Usine le Guerre in 
a banlieu of Paris. See her now as she takes her 
baby in her arms and seats herself in a low chair by a 
small crib. A wedding-ringed hand opens her work- 
ing blouse from the throat downward, the black lines 
of the cloth fold away from her bosom, revealing in 
lovely contrast the white, satiny texture of her skin. 
And she, too, even as you, a mother anywhere in the 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 327 

world, smiles happily into her baby's eyes as she 
holds him to her breast. It is a mother and child 
picture the like of which you will not find in any 
gallery of Europe. Azalie de Rigeaux, crooning 
softly here to her child, is a new figure in life, so new 
that she has not yet reached the canvas of even the 
modern masters in art. See just above the curve of 
her arm where rests the bay's head, the armlet that 
she wears on her left sleeve. Embroidered on it is 
that sign of her national enlistment, a bursting 
bomb. It is important because it is the clue to the 
new picture. All over the world war has called the 
woman to the factory. And what shall she do with 
the baby? Well, the baby is so valuable that the 
state is not going to let it cry. 

It is France that makes the security for maternity 
gilt-edged. By the gifts they are bringing here, one 
would say that this is the country that to-day takes 
precedence of all others in its appreciation of the ris- 
ing value of a baby. As every one has heard, there 
has not in a long time, in generations indeed, been a 
surplus of babies in France. As a matter of fact, 
they have always been scarce. And they are so dear 
that the passion for the child is the distinctive na- 
tional trait. This building in which Azalie de 
Rigeaux nurses her child to-day was erected at a 
cost of 75,000 francs. It stands in the factory yard, 
adjacent to the shop in which women make shells. 
In this sunny high-ceil inged room, with plenty of 
sunlight and air, rows and rows of dimpled babies 
sleep in the blue cribs with the dainty white cover- 



328 WOMEN WANTED 

lids. Four times a day the mothers from the shop 
across the way, as Azalie de Rigeaux has now, come 
to nurse them. Outside the long French windows 
there is a large French "jardin," where the older 
children, in blue and pink check aprons, play. The 
nursery dining room has a low table with little low 
chairs, where they come to their meals. Nourishing 
broths and other foods are prepared in a shining, 
perfectly equipped kitchen. There is a white bath- 
room with porcelain basins and baths of varying 
sizes; on the long shelf across the room are the sep- 
arate baskets that hold the individual brushes. 
Each child, on arrival in the morning, is given a 
bath and a complete change of clothes. Once a 
week they are weighed. The doctor and the staff 
of trained nurses are alert to detect the least devia- 
tion from normal. Scientific supervision like this 
costs the firm l franc 35 centimes per day per child. 
To Azalie de Rigeaux and the other mothers in their 
employ, it is free. 

It is this creche at Ivry-sur-Seine which is the 
model recommended by the minstry of munitions to 
the factories of France. The last feature to make 
this, a national institution, absolutely complete, has 
been added. It was the Union Francaise pour le 
Suffrage des Femmes that one day held a conference 
with the ministry of munitions. "Gentlemen," they 
said, "a mother who must go home from a factory 
to stand over a wash tub, gets so tired that the baby's 
source of nourishment is imperilled. And when a 
baby languishes, a future soldier may be lost." — A 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 329 

state department was at instant attention — ''Gentle- 
men," it was pointed out, "there is one thing more 
that you must do." Well, they have done it. In 
this model babies' building at Ivry-sur-Seine there is 
a steam laundry in which two women are kept con- 
stantly employed, so that there shall be no night 
laundry work for the child whom the mother takes 
home. There are washed eight hundred diapers a 
day. You see there is nothing that the Government 
will not do for a child in France. Nothing is too 
much trouble. 

Even her employers will be equally as pleased as 
the state if Azalie de Rigeaux shall decide to give 
another citizen to France. They have told me so. 
"Why, it is patriotism," the factory owner explained 
to me, as we stood there among the whirring belts 
and the revolving wheels of a thousand machines in 
this Usine de Guerre. "Don't you see," he patiently 
elucidated, "I'm sure if she will only have the baby 
every one else should do what they can." 

This is what they do for Azalie de Rigeaux. She 
comes directly under the protection of L'Office Cen- 
tral d' Assistance Maternelle et Infantile, which, as 
you will read on all the walls of Paris, is organised 
"to secure to all pregnant women adequate and suit- 
able nourishment, proper housing accommodations, 
relief from overwork and skilled medical advice, all 
of the social, legal and medical protection to which 
she is entitled in a civilised society." A visitor will 
arrive from the nearest Mairie to inform the pros- 
pective mother of all the aids that are available for 



330 WOMEN WANTED 

her. All of the municipally subsidised institutions 
have had their accommodations increased since the 
war. There are the Municipal Maternity Hospitals, 
where care is free, or there is the Mutualite Mater- 
nelle, the self-supporting maternity club through 
which one may make arrangements for accouchement. 
There are free meals for mothers at the Cantines 
Maternelles, which are spread over Paris. Are there 
other children in the family, so that their care is a 
burden to the mother? She must not tire herself 
with the housework. They will be taken to the 
country at municipal expense and she shall go to a 
Refuge to rest in preparation for the coming confine- 
ment. There are free layettes to be had at every 
Mairie. A limousine will even take the lady to a 
hospital if necessary. The military automobiles of 
the army are subject to requisition for this purpose 
by L' Office Central d' Assistance Maternelle et In- 
fantile of Paris. 

There is also definite financial assistance. The 
Government will pay to Azalie de Rigeaux ten francs 
and fifty centimes a week for four weeks before and 
four weeks after the confinement, with an additional 
three francs fifty centimes a week if she nurses the 
child. To this her employer tells me he will add 
his bonus for the baby, 105 francs if she has been in 
his employ for one year, 135 francs after three years, 
and after six years it will be 165 francs. All indi- 
cations point to market quotations on the French 
baby rising even higher. Prof. Pinard, the cele- 
brated accoucher of Paris, who has assisted into the 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 331 

world so many babies that he should know their value 
as much as any man may, is saying they are really 
worth more. Through the Academy of Medicine in 
France he is recommending to the Senate a measure 
providing for a payment to a mother, from the time 
that gestation begins until the child is one year old, 
of five francs a day. 

IT MEANS THE LIBERATION OF THE MOTHER 

But most significant to the woman movement of 
all lands is the welcome that the Usine de Guerre is 
extending to Azalie de Rigeaux. Of all the making 
over they have been doing for us in industry, this is 
perhaps the most revolutionary in its effects on the 
whole social structure. For when industry takes the 
baby, it means the passing of the wage envelope to a 
whole class of the population whose arms were 
hitherto literally too burdened to reach for it. Here 
at Ivry-sur-Seine they do not shake their heads and 
say, "Oh, you might have a baby. We prefer to em- 
ploy a man who won't." On the contrary preference 
in employment is given to a woman who has a child. 
The only person who takes precedence of her is the 
woman with two children or, of course, with three. 
From the day that she signifies she is going to have 
another, she becomes an object of special solicitude. 
She will be shielded from any injurious strain. Be- 
cause it may not be well for her to stand at the lathe, 
she will be transferred to the gauging department, 
where she may remain continuously seated. And, 
while the gauging department's regular rate of pay is 



332 WOMEN WANTED 

but 50 centimes an hour, her own job's rate of pay, 
60, 70, 80 centimes an hour, whatever it may be, 
will be continued. 

"But isn't it an interruption to your business to 
have employes who every now and then have to stop 
to have a baby?" I asked the French manufacturer. 
"Ah, no, Madame," he replied, "surely it is no dis- 
turbance at all. It is nothing even if a woman 
should wish to be absent for two or three months. 
Is she not serving her country? We simply arrange 
a large enough staff of employes so that always there 
are some to nil the gaps. Maternity is something 
that may be estimated by percentage. We count on 
it that Camille here will probably have a baby in 
July. Etienne, next to her, may have one in Septem- 
ber. Well, by the time a substitute employe is fin- 
ished with taking Camille's place, she will be re- 
quired in Etienne's place, then, perhaps, in Azalie's 
place. It is very easy, I say, to arrange." 

And it is because the rising value of a baby makes 
it worth while. It is in France, where maternity has 
always been important, that all of the institutions 
for the welfare of the child now being rushed to 
completion in other lands have been originally in- 
vented. We in America, in some of our large cities, 
have started the "clinic" and the "consultation" and 
the creche. Italy is inaugurating them. Russia 
sent to Paris for specific information about them be- 
fore the war. Germany's "Kaiserin Auguste Vic- 
toria Haus" in Berlin, a veritable "laboratory of the 
child," from which the child culture system adapted 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 333 

from France has been developed for the Empire, is a 
monument to the national thoroughness, which, mak- 
ing military preparation for the conquest of the 
world, made maternity preparation on almost as 
comprehensive a scale. 

Industry to-day beckoning the woman, you see, 
Parliament is bound to provide for the child. Mrs. 
Smith in England — or in America or anywhere else 
— you need not hesitate. 

Azalie de Rigeaux's baby is, what is it one shall 
say, as good as gold all day long. Do you know 
that he is so well regulated that there is no deviation 
from his perfection save on Mondays when he gets 
back to the ere cite fretful and perhaps a little in- 
clined to be colicky after a week end at home'? At 
that munitions creche down your street the babies 
shall have a bath every day and no one will have to 
carry the water toilsomely upstairs by the pint. 
Think of the dainty cribs to sleep in and the beauti- 
ful green garden to play in ! There are three meals 
a day that never fail. You can easier pay for those 
meals than cook them. How many skilled voca- 
tions are you trying to follow in your home ! The 
graduate of a school for mothers, you are doing, the 
best you can, more than the winner of a Cambridge 
tripos would attempt to undertake! Cooking and 
sewing and nursing, laundry work and scrubbing and 
child culture, that is the gamut of the achievements 
you are trying to accomplish. Oh, Mrs. Smith, one 
trade in the factory is easier. What artisan can be 
good at his job if he must also putter with half a 



334 WOMEN WANTED 

dozen others? Well, the world is no longer going 
to ask it of you, the maker of men ! 

THE CHILD'S CHANCE DEPENDS ON FAMILY INCOME 

Tradition may still rise to protest : But the home ! 
You wouldn't abolish the home ! I think you would 
if you had seen it, Mrs. Smith's home. Child mor- 
tality in her street is at the rate of 200 per 1,000. 
I know a home in the other end of London that is 
as lovely as a poet's dream. Child mortality in 
this district is 40 per 1,000. There is a great house 
facing a park. There are three children in it. They 
have a day nursery and a night nursery and a school 
room all to themselves. They are cared for by a 
head nurse, and an assistant nurse, a governess, and 
a mother who now and then comes to caress them 
and see that they are happy. There are, you see, 
four women — to say nothing of the household staff 
of eight servants indirectly contributing to the same 
service — to care for three children in the West End. 

In the East End Mrs. Smith has only one pair 
of hands to do for seven, and she is no superwoman. 
They live in two rooms that the fiercest all the time 
scrubbing could not keep clean. The discoloured 
walls are damp with mildew. You can see the 
vermin in the cracks. There isn't any pantry. 
There isn't any sink. There isn't so much as a cook 
stove, only an open grate. There isn't any poetry 
in a home on less than a pound a week! 

Down the street is the way out to the new home 
that Mrs. Smith's wage envelope will help to build. 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 335 

There will be at least 4 rooms and the children away 
during the day under expert care. The little chil- 
dren of the rich in the West End nursery have no 
more scientific supervision than the municipal creche 
will afford Mrs. Smith for hers. I know she will 
not longer personally wash their faces and wipe 
their noses. Even when she tries to, as you may 
have noticed in any land, she cannot possibly do 
those tasks as often as they should be done. The 
mere physical needs of children, any one else can 
attend to. But only a mother can love them. 
Hadn't we better conserve her more for that special 
function? The rising value of a baby begins to 
demand it. 

And don't worry about the effect of factory em- 
ployment on her health. Two government commis- 
sions of experts, one in France and one in England, 
tell us it's all right after all. Both report that a 
properly arranged factory is as good a place as any 
for a woman. Some significant figures presented to 
England's Birth Rate Commission show that the 
proportion of miscarriages is among factory work- 
ers 9.2 per cent, as compared with 16 per cent, among 
women doing housework in the home. Hard work 
and heavy work, you see, are just as harmful in 
Mrs. Smith's kitchen as they might be anywhere 
else — and not nearly so well paid ! Really, in spite 
of its historic setting there is no sacred significance 
attaching to the figure of a woman bending over a 
washtub or on her knees scrubbing a floor. Let us 
venerate instead Azalie de Rigeaux nursing her child 



336 WOMEN WANTED 

in a Usine de Guerre ! After the schools for moth- 
ers and the maternity clinics have done what they 
may to reduce infant mortality, the mothers in in- 
dustry may do some more. Take your babies in 
your arms, Mrs. Smith, and flee from that stalking 
spectre of poverty that has already snatched four 
of them to the grave. The door of the municipal 
creche stands ajar! 

Like this, the world is making ready for recon- 
struction. Let there be every first aid for the maker 
of men. We await one more measure : Mrs. Smith 
must never again have ten babies when she lives 
in two rooms — nor Frau Schmidt in Berlin. This 
unlimited increase that crowds children from the 
cradle to the coffin, in the haste to make room for 
more, has been the fatal force that has impelled 
nations teeming with too many people to make war 
for territorial expansion. We shall not blot out 
from civilisation the Prussian military ideal until we 
have likewise effaced the Prussian maternity ideal 
of reckless reproduction. That the cradles of the 
world may never again spill over, the nations must 
rise from the peace table with a new population 
policy. In the "birth politics" of the future there 
must be birth control. When children are scarce, 
are they dear. See France ! The rising value of a 
baby may yet lift the curse of Eve ! 

Then shall we be ready to repopulate right. 
After the battles are won and man's work of con- 
quest is done, woman's war work will only have 
begun. I have stood in the cathedral at Rheims 



THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY 337 

and in the stricken silence looked with sickening dis- 
may on the destruction of the beautiful temple of 
worship builded with such exquisite art and such 
infinite labour. But I assure you not all the ca- 
thedrals of Europe piled in a single colossal ruin, 
broken sculptured saint on saint, can stir the be- 
holder with the poignant pain of one war hospital! 
There in the whitewashed wards with the smell of 
blood and ether, where the maimed lie stiff and 
still and the dying moan and the mad rave in wild 
delirium, stand there and your soul shall shrivel in 
horror at the destruction of men ! It is the agony 
of it all, and the suffering and the sorrow and the 
grief of it all — and then something more. You 
creep with the feeling that every one of these men 
once was builded with such exquisite art and such 
infinite labour and such toilsome pain and anguish 
by God and a woman! It is a stupendous task of 
creation to be done over again when the armies shall 
have finished their work. Bone of her bone and 
flesh of her flesh, God and woman must rebuild the 
race. You unto whom a child can be born to-day, 
to you Parliaments make their prayer! 

Not a captain of industry who assembles the en- 
gines of war, not a general who directs the armies, 
may do for his country what you can do who stand 
beside its cradles. The cry that rings out over 
Empires bleeding in the throes of death is the old- 
est cry in the world. Women wanted for maternity J 



CHAPTER X 

The Ring and the Woman 

That woman who crossed the threshold of the 
Doll's House awhile ago — you would scarcely recog- 
nise her as you meet her to-day anywhere abroad in 
the world. She has put aside yesterday as it were 
an old cloak that has just slipped from her shoul- 
ders. And she stands revealed as the one of whom 
some of us have for a long time written and some 
of us have read. For a generation at least she has 
been looked for. Now she is here. 

You see when her country called her, it was des- 
tiny that spoke. Though no nation knew. Gov- 
ernments have only thought they were making 
women munition workers and women conductors and 
women bank tellers and women doctors and women 
lawyers and women citizens and all the rest. I 
doubt if there is a statesman anywhere who has 
leaned to unlock a door of opportunity to let the 
woman movement by, who has realised that he was 
but the instrument in the hands of a higher power 
that is reshaping the world for mighty ends, rough 
hewn though they be to-day from the awful chaos 
of war. 

But there is one who will know. When the man 
at the front gets back and stands again before the 

338 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 339 

cottage rose bowered on the English downs, red 
roofed in France and Italy, blue trimmed in Ger- 
many or ikon blessed in Russia or white porched off 
Main Street in America, he will clasp her to his 
heart once more. Then he will hold her off, so, at 
arm's length and look long into her eyes and deep 
into her soul. And lo, he shall see there the New 
Woman. This is not the woman whom he left be- 
hind when he marched away to the Great World 
War. Something profound has happened to her 
since. It is woman's coming of age. Look, she is 
turning the ring on her finger to-day. 

When the man in khaki went away, that ring was 
sign and symbol of the status assigned to her by all 
the oldest law books and religious books of the world. 
And none of the modern ones had been able wholly 
to eradicate from their pages the point of view that 
was the most prevailing opinion of civilisation. The 
most ancient classification of all listed in one cate- 
gory "a man's house and his wife, his man servant 
and his maidservant, his ox and his ass and any other 
possessions that are his." An English state church 
has given her in marriage to him "to obey him and 
serve him." A German state church has bound her 
"to be subject to him as to her lord and master." 
Christian lands have agreed that a woman when 
she marries enters into a state of coverture by which 
they tell us "the husband hath power and dominion 
over his wife." Religious teachers from St. Paul 
to Martin Luther, law givers from Moses to Napo- 
leon have been unanimous on this point, which Na- 



34o WOMEN WANTED 

poleon framing his code for France summed up 
briefly, Woman belongs to man. 

This has been the basic assumption of church and 
state from whose courts of authority each concession 
of individuality for woman has been won only by 
process of slow amendment. It is still so subtly 
interwoven in dogma and statute that there is not 
yet any land where a woman, though thinking her- 
self free, may not trip against a legal disability that 
has not yet been dislodged. For Blacks tone, the 
great authority of reference, declares "the very being 
or legal existence of the woman is suspended during 
the marriage or at least is incorporated in that of 
the husband." And all over the world, all the 
church councils and all the state courts have not yet 
been so reformed but that by reversion to type they 
will hark back to the pronouncement, Man and wife 
are one — and he is the one. So the man's mind 
thinketh. 

And the woman's mind? Since he went away in 
khaki, it has thought long, long thoughts. When 
he comes back, this new woman looking into his 
eyes with the level glance, he will find is a woman 
who has earned money — in a new world that has 
been made over for her so that she can. You see 
all those lines of women in industry and commerce 
and the professions'? Some of them walk up to a 
paymaster's window on Saturday night and some 
of them wait for the checks that arrive in their mail. 
But it is an experience in common through which 
all are passing. The open door to the shop and the 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 341 

factory and the counting room, to law or to medi- 
cine is the great gateway to the future where dreams 
shall come true. For the women who have passed 
through, have arrived at last at the great goal, eco- 
nomic independence. 

Now what that means the sociologists could tell. 
Though they might not think to put it in terms 
of, for instance, Elsa von Stuttgart's slippers. They 
would, I suppose, agree that economic independence 
is the right to earn one's living — and be paid for it 
like a man. One earned it yesterday if one washed 
the dishes and cooked the meals and reared the chil- 
dren and kept the house for the other person who 
held the purse. Housekeepers of this class have 
been the busiest people we have had about us. And 
yet the census offices administered by men had so 
little idea of these women's economic value, that 
they have been actually listed in government sta- 
tistical returns as "unoccupied." So also of course 
were the other housekeepers who, eliminating some 
of these most arduous tasks from the long day, 
nevertheless were not at least idle when they bore 
a man's children and presided at his dinner table 
and entertained his friends and practised generally 
the graceful art of making a home. When they 
undertook these duties, there was a church promise, 
With all my worldly goods, I thee endow. That 
figure of speech, the law courts reduce to "mainte- 
nance," that is to say, board and clothes. But, so 
widely disseminated has been the idea that the lady 
is "unoccupied" that these are generally regarded 



342 WOMEN WANTED 

not in the nature of a recognition of service and a 
return for value received, but rather as perquisites 
bountifully bestowed on the recipient. So that fre- 
quently her range of choice in the matter has been, 
we may say, limited. 

Frau Elsa von Stuttgart before the war had her 
board and clothes. But her husband had forbidden 
her to get her hats at a certain little French shop in 
Unter den Linden that she had always patronised 
before her marriage. And with all his money, he 
decided that one pair of evening slippers would do 
even for a woman in the social position of a Prus- 
sian officer's wife. They lived in a villa at Zehlen- 
dorff that was perfectly equipped with everything 
that he considered desirable. There was a grand 
piano of marvellous tone, though she didn't even 
play the piano at all. She was a doctor of phi- 
losophy, who before her marriage had been a teacher 
at the High School in Berlin and her hobby, it hap- 
pened, was books. She liked them in beautiful 
bindings and she always used to buy them that way. 
But of course she couldn't any more because her 
husband said it was extravagance, quite useless ex- 
travagance. Well, really you know, maintenance 
may be slippers and hats, but it isn't books after 
all. And she had a lovely house and a piano of 
marvellous tone. How hard it was about the slip- 
pers, I suppose only a woman can understand. You 
see Elsa von Stuttgart has pretty feet, small and 
dainty feet. Every other woman in her set has Ger- 
man feet. "Look at them," she whispered to me at 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 343 

a kaffee klatch one day in 1914. And I did. And 
I knew why her soul loved little satin slippers better 
than Beethoven or Lizst. She has them now once 
more. The house with the grand piano is closed 
and her husband is with his regiment. Elsa von 
Stuttgart in a class room is lecturing on philosophy 
again. She has rented a small apartment the walls 
of which are lined with books. You think the slip- 
pers a luxury for war time perhaps? Well, she 
wrote me that she has done penance for them in 
extra meatless days to atone for the price. 

In France the Countess Madelaine de Ranier 
lived in a chateau of the old aristocracy. And she 
had a fortune of hundreds of thousands of francs 
but not a sou to spend as she pleased. You would 
have thought that she had everything that heart 
could wish, until you caught unawares the wistful 
expression in her eyes when they forgot their smil- 
ing. Madelaine de Ranier, having no children of 
her own, would have loved to write checks for the 
charities that took care of other people's children. 
But she couldn't. It was a very large dot that she 
had brought to her husband. But by the laws of 
France he administered it. Out of the income, he 
of course paid her bills. The third year of her 
marriage there occurred to her the idea for a confi- 
dential arrangement which she made with her dress- 
maker for doubling on the bills submitted for her 
evening gowns and dividing the proceeds accruing. 
It was the Countess' only source of ready money. 
She kept it in the secret drawer of her jewel case, 



344 WOMEN WANTED 

these few francs that she could count her own, 
among her costly articles of adornment valued at 
thousands. To-day the Count is somewhere on the 
Somme and Madelaine de Ranier is daily at a desk 
in Paris directing the great commercial house in 
which her dot and the family fortune are invested. 
I saw her in the winter of 1917. Her eyes were 
sparkling. From the large income that she now 
handles, she had just written off a contribution to 
the Orphans of France Fund for the nation. And 
nobody had said, "You must not," or equally as au- 
thoritatively, "I do not wish it." 

In England there is Edith Russell, Dr. Edith Rus- 
sell she really is. She gave up her profession when 
she married, to devote herself wholly to home mak- 
ing in the great house in Cavendish Square, London. 
It requires nine servants and careful planning to 
meet the expenses, even though her husband turns 
over to her all of his income. "Can't we go out 
to Hampstead to a smaller house instead?" she asked 
him one day, laying her housekeeping accounts be- 
fore him. She was trying somehow to plan for a 
financial surplus. The Malthusian League was in 
need of funds and she used to be one of its most 
earnest workers. But her husband said: "Not at 
all." Even if there were indeed hundreds of pounds 
available, he did not approve of the League's prin- 
ciples anyhow. Now Dr. Edith Russell in response 
to her country's call is back on the staff of the bor- 
ough health department in the medical work in which 
she was engaged before her marriage. And she is 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 345 

again a Malthusian League contributor. You see, 
it's her own money now, not her husband's. 

Up in the north of England there is a factory 
town where the largest works in November, 1914, 
hung out a notice that any women who before their 
marriage had been employed there would be taken 
back. Mrs. Webber was. The regular weekly 
wage is so much better than the occasional charing 
which was all that she had been able to get to sup- 
plement her husband's frequent unemployment. 
Her children are among those who have been since 
the war transferred at school from the free list to 
the paid dinners. Before the war there were 1 1,000 
children in this town to be supplied with free school 
dinners. Now since their mothers work outside the 
home, this figure has dropped to 2,370. Mrs. Web- 
ber also is one of those women who have been shop- 
ping. All over Europe they have been doing it. 
From Petrograd to Berlin and Paris and London, 
delighted shop keepers report that women who never 
had money before are spending it. The curate in 
the parish to which Mrs. Webber belongs — Mrs. 
Webber used to char for his wife, but is no longer 
available — told me that these working classes have 
gone perfectly mad about money and the reckless 
expenditure of it. And I asked him how and he 
said: "Why cheese, they all of them have it for 
supper now. And the woman in that house, the 
third from the end of the row," he pointed it out 
from his study window, "has a fur coat." It was 
Mrs. Webber's house the curate mentioned. 



346 WOMEN WANTED 

HIS PERSONALITY AND HERS 

Well now, you see, to Elsa von Stuttgart in Ber- 
lin, it may be little satin evening slippers, and to 
Madelaine de Ranier in Paris it may be orphans of 
France, and to Dr. Edith Russell in London it may 
be the great reform for which the Malthusian League 
is organised, and to Mrs. Webber it may be school 
dinners and cheese and a fur coat — but to all of them 
it's economic independence. Mrs. Webber says, "A 
shilling of your own is worth two that 'e gives you." 
Edith Russell and the rest I have not heard say it. 
But from Countess to char woman, you see, this 
about the wage envelope is certain: It's yours to 
burn if you care to — or to buy with it what you 
choose ! There are millions of women over this war 
racked world who have it to-day, who never had it 
before. And the hand that holds this new wage en- 
velope holds the future of the race in its keeping. 
Not since that magna charta that the barons wrested 
from King John, has so powerful a guarantee of 
liberty been won. It carries with it all the freedoms 
that the feminists have ever formulated. She who 
stepped out of the Doll's House stands at the thresh- 
old of a new earth. Something very much more 
than little satin slippers and books and fur coats 
and their own money is coming to women ! 

Let us see. You would have been astounded, I 
believe, if Elsa von Stuttgart had attempted to dic- 
tate to her husband his hats or his slippers. Any- 
way, Herr von Stuttgart would. You would not 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 347 

have expected Edith Russell to have suggested across 
the breakfast table: "My dear, the propaganda of 
such and such a society to which you belong is not 
pleasing to me. I do not care to have you support 
it." Why, either gentleman would have been a 
henpecked husband to have permitted any such in- 
terference with his personal liberty. Not even in 
America would any wife so presume to dare. It is 
quite likely that a lady living in New York could 
announce over the coffee cups, "My dear, we will 
move to Long Island to-day." And the voice be- 
hind the newspaper would probably agree without 
a demurrer, "I'll be out on the 4:30 train." Prob- 
ably also he has never heard how many pairs of 
slippers she has, and all he knows about her hats 
is their price. But after all, it is only by the priv- 
ilege he permits her that the lady can put it over 
like this. At any moment that he cares to assert it, 
he still holds the balance of power in this house- 
hold. 

Because man and wife are one, he who carries the 
purse is the one. It's only the new purse in the 
family that can alter the situation anywhere in the 
world. She who carries it is another one, with her 
personal liberty too. In the last analysis, it is only 
a person who can pay the rent who can talk with 
assertion about where "we" shall live and how. 

No economist in any university chair understands 
this any more clearly than does Mrs. Webber, who 
once lived in two rooms and now lives in three be- 
cause she can pay the rent! The new purse in her 



348 WOMEN WANTED 

family has raised the whole scale of living for her 
and for her children. Yesterday her personality was 
merged and submerged in that of a husband to whose 
standard of maintenance she was limited. To-day 
she is emerging with a wage envelope in her hand 
and a personality of her own, as is likewise Elsa von 
Stuttgart and Edith Russell and Madelaine de 
Ranier. Society may be tremendously startled to 
find them at last counted so that one and one in the 
marriage relation shall make two. When in this 
great world war, that autocracy with its divine right 
of kings that has ruled and wrecked civilisation shall 
have been swept from the throne, there is another 
autocracy with its "divine" authority of one sex over 
the other that is going into the scrap heap of old 
systems. 

Through the events of these war days already it 
is clear that such an eternal purpose runs. Nobody 
thought of it when woman was called from the home 
in all lands. But there has really begun the casting 
off of that ancient chrysalis of "coverture." Have 
you by chance yet met among your acquaintances 
the woman who is refusing to part with her own 
name? Mary McArthur, the great English labour 
leader, is the wife of Mr. Anderson, a member of 
Parliament and she is the mother of a baby. But 
she has never ceased to be herself. "You call your- 
self Miss McArthur," a curious inquirer remarked to 
her one day, "and yet they say your cook tells that 
you are very respectable." 

There are numbers of women like this in London 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 349 

and in New York, who are preferring their own iden- 
tity to that of their husbands. The German and 
Scandinavian women going a little farther say, "Let 
us at mature age take an adult title." Master Jones, 
you know, does not wait for the day of his marriage 
to emerge from his adolescence as "Mr." Jones. 
Fraulein is but a diminutive, "little Frau," a prefix 
of immaturity. Rosika Schwimmer, touring Amer- 
ica for a lecture bureau, assured inquiring reporters : 
"Of course I am Frau Schwimmer. Why shouldn't 
I be? I have passed my 35th birthday." The Im- 
perial Union of Women Suffragists of Germany in 
convention assembled, not long ago decided to adopt 
the adult title Frau for all women of mature age, the 
"unity title," they call it. In this first faint stirring, 
there is significance of wide changes. 

She whose identity had so disappeared at the altar, 
that the law actually wrote her down on the statute 
books as civiliter mortua, one "civilly dead," is about 
to be restored to the status of an individual. The 
long road, along which the woman movement of yes- 
terday made its slow way, is now at the sharpest 
turning. 

The struggle of women in all lands to be released 
from the discriminations that have limited their hu- 
man activities set free the spinster some time ago. 
The point of view that is now generally accepted 
about her, and without contravention in the most 
advanced countries, was most definitely formulated 
some sixty years ago in Scandinavia. There they 
put on the statute books a law abolishing the previ- 



350 WOMEN WANTED 

ous male guardianship over unmarried women and 
permitting a person "of staid age and character" to 
manage her own affairs. At first this was a privilege 
to be granted only on special appeal to the king. 
But at last the right of self-government at 21 was 
established for all unmarried women. So radical a 
departure from custom was of course not accom- 
plished without misgivings. There were those who 
feared that for a woman to manage her own affairs, 
was not in accordance with true womanly dignity and 
the dictates of religion. They said, The majority of 
women do not want it. Why, then, give them a 
responsibility they do not wish or ask for? But in 
spite of those objections, the spinster came to be rec- 
ognised as a responsible individual. 

For so long now has the world been accustomed to 
seeing her going about, doing as she pleases almost 
as any other adult, that we have forgotten that she 
ever couldn't. She can acquire education. She can 
own property. She has been able for some time now 
to get into a great many occupations and professions : 
only her difficulty was to get up. And there has 
been that limitation to her income. It has remained 
stationary at a figure seldom passing two-thirds that 
of a man's income. The teaching profession affords 
statistics that are world wide testimony to the situa- 
tion that has prevailed from, say, Newark, N. J., to 
Archangel, Russia: there have been women school 
teachers working for a less wage than the man school 
janitor: there have been women professors at the 
head of high school departments at a salary less than 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 351 

that of the men subordinates whom they directed. 
Still, in all of her personal affairs, a spinster in every 
country has been for a long time now as free as the 
rest of the people. 

SIGNING AWAY HER FREEDOM 

Then, on the day that the ring is slipped on her 
finger, she has put her name to a contract that has 
more or less signed away her liberty, according to the 
part of the world in which she happens to live. In 
Finland, for instance, where the position of women 
has been in many respects as advanced as anywhere 
in the world, even a woman member of Parliament 
at her marriage reverts to type, as it were: though 
she still sits in Parliament, she passes under the 
guardianship of her husband! In Sweden, she lost 
her vote : for that country, in 1 862 the first to grant 
the municipal franchise to women, cautiously with- 
held it until 1909 from married women. There is, 
indeed, almost no land in which marriage does not 
in some way limit for the rest of her life a woman's 
participation in world affairs. She may have lost 
property rights, personal rights, political rights, or 
perhaps she has lost her job, her right to work and 
be paid for it. At any rate, she must look around to 
determine how many of these things may have hap- 
pened to her. Any of them that haven't, are special 
exemptions from that universal ruling of all nations 
that a woman on marriage enters into a state of 
coverture, with its accompanying legal disability. 
"Disability" is defined by Dicey's "Digest" as the 



352 WOMEN WANTED 

"status of being an infant, lunatic, or married wom- 
an." And there you are. 

It was from that predicament that the earliest 
woman's rights' associations sought to extricate the 
woman who had taken the wedding veil and ring. 
Susan B. Anthony's first most famous achievement 
back in the sixties was a law establishing the right 
of a married woman in New York State to the own- 
ership of her own clothes! By specific enactments 
since then, one and another of the rights to which 
other human beings are naturally born have been 
bestowed on married women. The most clearly de- 
fined of these, and the most widely recognised at last, 
are the right to their separate property and the right 
to their own earnings, which prevails in most of the 
United States. The Married Women's Property 
Act accomplished it in England. In France, after 
14 years of agitation for it, Mme. Jeanne Schmall 
and the Societe l'Avant Courriere in 1907 at last 
secured the law giving to the married woman the free 
disposition of her salary. But these concessions it 
is not easy to disentangle from that basic notion, 
which is warp and woof of the whole fabric of law, 
that a married woman has passed under the guardian- 
ship of her husband. 

For in Germany and Scandinavia and France, 
"separate property" to ensure her title to it, must be 
specially secured to her by an antenuptial contract. 
In Sweden, her earnings are hers, only if they remain 
in cash. In France she is permitted to invest them 
in bonds, provided first she either makes affidavit 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 353 

before a notary proving her ownership or brings a 
written permit from her husband. In the State of 
Washington, the supreme attempt to confer equality 
on woman finds expression in the statute: "All 
laws which impose or recognise civil disabilities upon 
a wife which are not imposed or recognised as exist- 
ing as to the husband, are abolished." But in spite 
of that most laudable effort, the end is not yet at- 
tained. For the State of Washington is still en- 
meshed in the community property system, by which 
the management and control of the common property 
in marriage is vested in the husband. And although 
the law has been distinctty framed that a married 
woman is entitled to her own earnings, it practically 
takes them away from her by requiring her to count 
them in with the community property which is under 
her husband's control. The atomic theory, you see, 
was not more firmly fixed in science than is this idea 
that has been embedded in the social structure that 
a married woman is legally, civilly, and politically 
a minor ! 

Even in these United States, where the mention of 
the "subjection of woman" raises a smile, so largely 
has it by the grace of the American man been per- 
mitted to become a dead letter, the employment of 
married women has remained against public policy. 
Many boards of education have by-laws about it. 
Even these women teachers who commit matrimony 
and conceal it are almost invariably later on de- 
tected and dropped from the pay roll when found 
guilty of maternity. Business houses have shared 



354 WOMEN WANTED 

in the prejudice. A Chicago bank as lately as 1913 
adopted a rule requiring the resignation of woman 
employes on marriage. Because the married woman, 
the bank president said, "should be at home, not at 
a typewriter or an adding machine." Similarly a 
United States civil service regulation reads: "No 
married woman will be appointed to a classified posi- 
tion in the postal service, nor will any woman occu- 
pying a classified position in the postal service be 
reappointed to such position when she shall marry." 

A world has been arranged, you see, on the as- 
sumption of the complete eclipse of the personality 
of the married woman — with the burden resting on 
her to disprove it in the legal situations where she 
has come to be recognised as an individual. Custom 
prefers that a married woman should be a dependent 
person. It was an idea that fifty years of feminist 
bombardment had not dislodged from the popular 
mind. Now in four years of war, it has crumbled. 

"Women wanted," called the world in need, 
wanted even though married ! And out of the seclu- 
sion and separation to which she was hitherto con- 
signed, the woman with the ring has come to find 
her wage envelope. All regulations against her em- 
ployment are now rescinded in Europe, as soon they 
will be here. The working woman in particular has 
been given her release. The state, you remember, 
will now cook her meals and care for her children. 
And it was all a mistake that attributed infant mor- 
tality to the industrial employment of mothers. 
Now it is found that a wife's wage envelope really 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 355 

reduces infant mortality by improving environment. 
There will be fewer of Mrs. Webber's children, you 
know, dying in three rooms than in two ! 

The ban on the married woman in the civil service 
and in the professions is lifted. The Association of 
Austrian Women's Organisations in their 1916 con- 
vention passed the resolution demanding the aboli- 
tion of the "celibacy clause" for women office hold- 
ers. And although no country has as yet formally 
erased this from the statute books, governments have 
at least tacitly consented to remember it no more 
against a woman that she has married. That is why 
Dr. Edith Russell is again practising medicine in the 
public health service and Prof. Elsa von Stuttgart 
is teaching philosophy. Especially in medicine is it 
recognised that the married woman physician is more 
than ever fitted for a part in the campaign for the 
conservation of child life. And if she is also a 
mother, so much the better. Why was it never 
thought of before? Of course a person who has had 
a baby is the real expert who knows more about it 
than the person who never can have one. Women 
formerly dropped from the civil service on account 
of marriage have been recalled all over Europe. 
Even Germany has opened to them post, telegraph, 
and railway positions. So many masters in Ger- 
many's upper high schools are at the front, that mar- 
ried women have been called to these positions. 
Hundreds of married women have been reinstated 
in the school rooms of England. Detroit, Mich., 
the other day repealed its regulations which forbade 



356 WOMEN WANTED 

the employment of married women as teachers in the 
public schools. It is Russia that has led all lands 
in her recognition of the woman teacher, not only- 
refusing longer to penalise her for marriage but 
actually, as we have seen, establishing for her the 
principle of equal pay for equal work. 

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MINOR 

Like this, the married woman has to-day been 
welcomed in industry, in commerce, and in the pro- 
fessions. This person of affairs abroad in the world 
a minor! It is more than a disability that she her- 
self must endure. It becomes an annoyance to the 
world to have her so. According to Bacon's 
Abridgement, a very imposing volume, it is still 
written that "the law looks upon husband and wife 
but as one person and therefore allows but of one 
will between them, which is placed in the husband." 
But you see what a far cry it is from the woman in 
London or Paris or Berlin to "the one" on the west- 
ern front. How is she to "obey" that man in the 
Vosges or on the Somme since she cannot have 
telegraphic communication about her daily move- 
ments'? And without it, the French woman was left 
in a helpless tangle in the Napoleonic code. 

Madelaine de Ranier at the head of a great busi- 
ness concern in Paris found herself forbidden to sign 
a check, unable to open a bank account. The Count 
had enlisted on the second day after war was de- 
clared and he had left with her a sum of gold. 
When it was exhausted and she faced the need of 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 357 

funds, she was unable to negotiate a loan on valu- 
able bonds that she owned. Oh, the bonds were all 
right. The difficulty was that she was a married 
woman. And though very rich, she nevertheless 
was obliged to turn to friends who relieved her im- 
mediate financial necessities. Now in the drawer 
of her office desk there is a legal paper bearing the 
seal of France: across the bottom is printed "Bon 
pour autorisalion marital e" and beneath is the 
Count's signature. Until he had consented to make 
this arrangement, sending on from the front this 
"authorisation of the husband," she was prohibited 
from transacting any business. For a married 
woman in France might not sell property or mort- 
gage it or acquire it or sign a business contract or 
go to law without the consent of her husband! 
Women acting temporarily as mayors of some of 
the French villages^ from which almost the entire 
male population has been mobilised, have found it 
necessary in order to execute municipal papers to 
turn to a male citizen for his signature, even though 
he might not be able to write and could only make 
his mark. Finally in 1916, the situation came up^ 
for legal decision. The validity of a building con- 
tract entered into by a French woman was ques- 
tioned in court. The judge after mature delibera- 
tion rendered a decision that although the woman 
was not empowered to sign the contract, yet as she 
had acted with the tacit consent of her husband and 
in his interest and that of the country, the court 
would uphold the validity of the act. "It is neces- 



358 WOMEN WANTED 

sary," he said, "that for the welfare of France, 
women shall take the place of men and perform 
duties which have hitherto been considered outside 
their sphere." The Union Fraternelle des Femmes at 
once began pressing Parliament for the removal from 
the statute books of the requirement for "maritale 
autorisation" And not long ago the Chamber of 
Deputies passed the bill granting to married women 
for the period of the war, permission to demand from 
the courts the right to do without this legal formal- 
ity. Italy in 1917 completely swept away this same 
ancient restriction. The bill introduced by the Ital- 
ian Minister of Justice, Signor Sacchi, abrogated not 
only maritale autorisation, but "every other law 
which in the field of civil and commercial rights 
curtails the capacities of Italian women." Speak- 
ing for the measure in Parliament, Signor Sacchi 
declared it an "act of justice — of reparation almost, 
to which women have now more right than ever." 

But these civil disabilities have not been limited 
to Latin countries. You may find them anywhere 
as a hang-over from past ages. It is simply the 
natural corollary to that old doctrine of coverture 
that the acts of the dependent person should lack 
authority before the law. Even in the State of 
Washington, a wife may not sue alone in a court of 
law to recover personal damages : her husband must 
join with her in the suit. Everywhere in the pro- 
fessions and in business, woman's progress has been 
blocked because the courts, looking into the law 
books, found the status of this person in question. 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 359 

If her protected position more or less prevents her 
from entering into legal contracts, doubt is cast on 
all of her agreements. What prudent business man 
would wish to engage in a business transaction with 
her'? There are provisions of the Married Women's 
Property Act in England, which make her not liable 
to imprisonment for refusal to pay her debts. And 
who would choose to be represented in a court of law 
by an advocate who, though to-day in clear posses- 
sion of all of her capacities, may to-morrow cease to 
be "responsible" before the law 4 ? For any woman, 
though not yet married, is always subject to that 
liability ! That was what the courts of the United 
States decided when the first women began to apply 
for admission to the legal profession. And it is to 
correct the position in which women are placed by 
the common law that their admission to the practice 
of law in America has been by the slow process of an 
"enabling act" from State to State. In England, 
where this common law still bars the way, their pres- 
ent appeal now before Parliament is significantly en- 
titled "A Bill to remove disqualifications on the 
ground of sex or marriage for the admission of per- 
sons as solicitors." 

There is still another "disability" which is caus- 
ing to-day perhaps the most world wide concern of 
all. A spectacular figure has been silhouetted 
against the background of the great war. In the 
tranquil days of peace, a woman might have been 
all her life married to a man of differing nationality 
without making the discovery that she had thereby 



360 WOMEN WANTED 

lost her own: by law when she married, she became 
of her husband's nationality. When the troops 
began to march in 1914, a wife like this suddenly 
found herself a woman without a country. Fright- 
ened English women married to Germans resident in 
London, panic-stricken German women married to 
Englishmen who happened to be resident in Berlin, 
knew not which way to turn for a haven from the 
terrors of war. Pronounced aliens in their home 
land, their position was even worse than that of the 
woman of actual enemy birth who was stranded in 
a foreign country when the war burst. She could at 
least go home. But where should a woman who 
was married to an enemy alien go? 

Her own country turned on her coldly with the 
declaration, His people are your people. And no- 
where in the world would she be so little welcome 
as among his people now at war with and bitterly 
hostile to hers. There are instances where these 
women have been obliged to find refuge in neutral 
countries. In some lands they have been permitted 
to remain in the place of their birth, but under police 
espionage. A man and his wife, you know, are one. 
And if he controls her absolutely, from her slippers 
to her principles, is it likely that she will dare to be 
a free agent in her war sympathies? As a matter of 
fact, this war has developed that she is always more 
or less under the cold suspicion even of relatives and 
neighbours, of having along with the loss of her own 
nationality lost also her patriotism. Who shall say 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 361 

but that in obedience to her husband she may be a 
spy? I stood at the desk in the Bow Street Police 
Station registering my arrival in London one war 
day, when a timid voice of inquiry at my side also 
addressed the sergeant: "I want to ask," she said 
diffidently, "if I could possibly have my mail sent 
here to police headquarters? You see, it's letters 
from my husband interned here in England because 
he's a German. I'm an English woman. But every 
boarding house in London where I try to live, as soon 
as that envelope marked 'Enemy Internment Camp' 
arrives in my mail, turns me out." 

Like this, the "alien wife" has to be shunted about 
in many lands to-day. Even a woman who has not 
so lost her nationality may not travel without all of 
the credentials of her marital status to establish it. 
If you apply for a passport at Washington, you are 
asked for your husband's birth certificate and under 
some conditions your marriage certificate. A mar- 
ried man is not asked for his. Why this inquiry into 
your personal affairs? Because it is tacitly assumed 
that you are so under the authority of another person 
that there is no knowing what he may make you do. 
By all law and religion you have been taught to obey 
him. Then if he told you to blow up a ship, would 
you? The only way to make sure that you are a 
"safe" person to be at large, is to make sure of your 
husband's loyalty. For your identity is not your 
own, you see, it's his. If he happens to be French 
or Russian or German or Hottentot, so you must be. 



362 WOMEN WANTED 

woman's coming of age 

That's the way that men have made the world. 
Now see it beginning to be made over. Women 
everywhere are crying out in their conventions and 
associations that the married woman's own nation- 
ality should be restored to her. America is the first 
country to take action about it. And here, because 
women have arrived at the halls of government, it is 
more than resolution and petition. The United 
States Congress has before it a bill proposing the 
repeal of the law compelling women to relinquish 
their American citizenship on marriage to foreigners. 
The bill was introduced, let us note, by the Hon. 
Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to be a member 
of the national law-making body. 

What was it man said a little while ago: "You 
do not need a vote, my dear. I will represent you 
in government and make the laws for you." So all 
over the world he did. But isn't it plain now that 
he made a mess of some of the laws he made for her 4 ? 
It is a conviction that has crystallised simultaneously 
in all countries that woman in her present independ- 
ent sphere of activity has won her right to self- 
determination in all matters personally important to 
her. That is why measures for her enfranchisement 
are so universally under way. Let her vote for her- 
self. Let her represent herself. No one else has 
been able successfully to do this for her. And it 
may be that now she will be able to make better 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 363 

arrangements for herself than others have for her 
in this world where certainly a great deal has gone 
wrong. 

So we have arrived at woman's coming of age. 
She who used to be by the most ancient family law 
passed as a chattel from the guardianship of a father 
to that of a husband, is now to be an individual. It 
is only now that she could be. In a way they were 
right yesterday who refused to regard her as a respon- 
sible person. For she wasn't. Under the coercion 
of coverture, she even had to think the way that 
pleased the person who paid her bills ! To-day with 
a wage envelope in one hand and a ballot in the 
other, she is as much of a human being as any one 
else is. As such, she is in a position to find the full 
status of her own personality. For the first time 
since history began, she will be under no one else's 
authority. 

No greater revolution than this will have been 
wrought by the Great World War. It is going to 
be safe to permit to wives in all lands that they 
retain their own nationality. The reason is clear: 
because no one can compel this new woman, even 
though she is a wife, to be a spy, or anything else 
that she does not wish to be. Or anything else that 
she does not wish to be! 

In those words, the woman movement of to-day 
full-throated carols a hope for humanity that has 
not echoed before in all the epics or the sagas or the 
inspired revelations since the fall of man. Who 



364 WOMEN WANTED 

giveth this woman in marriage? She who was a 
bondwoman now is free. And church and state 
shall hear her terms ! 

Oh, yes, they shall ! For a reform of the institu- 
tion on which society rests is all that will prevent a 
rebellion against it. What do women want? This 
woman who turns the ring on her finger? Read the 
publications that during the past decade have said: 
The Free Woman, edited by Dora Marsden in Eng- 
land; Minna Cauer's Die Frauenbewegung and 
Marie Stritt's Die Frauenfrage and Helene Stocker's 
Die Neue Generation in Germany; La Francaise, 
edited by Jane Misme in France; and Margaret 
Sanger's The Woman Rebel in New York; the teach- 
ings of Dr. Alice Vickerey in London and of Dr. 
Aletta Jacobs in Amsterdam. There were even 
women in the radical vanguard of that woman move- 
ment of yesterday who were ready to end marriage 
if it were not mended. 

The world — and man who made it — had no ade- 
quate conception of the hurt that was smothered and 
smouldering in the heart of her over whom he exer- 
cised his dominion and power. Windows were heard 
smashing in England. Over in Germany there 
had begun a breaking with less noise about it, so that 
the world in general did not know. In the Kaiser's 
kingdom right in the face of the mailed fist, tradi- 
tions not to be so easily repaired as glass were being 
shattered. But it was the suffragette outburst in 
London that caught public attention. Thoughtful 
men who honestly wanted to know — and never 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 365 

could understand — turned to each other with the 
question, Why do women do this'? And no man 
could tell. 

Gentlemen, come with me. There is sitting in 
Westminster in 1910 a Royal Commission on Mar- 
riage and Divorce. Not yet even have their findings 
changed English law. But the commission was ap- 
pointed to make inquiry into these matters in re- 
sponse to a rising feeling of unrest over the present 
arrangements. Witnesses, to give evidence that it 
may be determined what ought to be done, are in 
1910 being called. This government commission, it 
should be noted, quite contrary to precedent, includes 
among the churchmen and statesmen who have been 
appointed to decide the question, also two women. 
One of them, the Lady Francis Balfour, is interro- 
gating a witness whom she has summoned to the 
stand because she has a particular point that she 
wishes to elucidate. He is the Bishop of Birming- 
ham, whose church insists that at marriage the woman 
passes indissolubly into the power of the husband. 
To the man, it is permitted that he may divorce her 
for adultery. But so long as these two shall live, 
not even for that offence on his part may she have 
release. He may beat. her. He may flay her soul. 
But she is his — unless she gets all of these details 
spread on the public records and the judges of the 
courts decide that there are enough of them legally 
to constitute "cruelty." Then, for adultery together 
with this cruelty on the part of a husband, a few 
English women have been allowed divorce. But it 



366 WOMEN WANTED 

is very difficult and very expensive and very offen- 
sive to the clergy when it has been actually accom- 
plished. 

The Lady Francis Balfour is speaking. To the 
Bishop of Birmingham she is saying: "Let me take 
a concrete case. You may have a woman who is a 
Christian and you may have her husband ill using 
her in some sort of way. We have had evidence 
put before us, which is of course known to us all, 
that there are even men who live on the prostitution 
of their wives. Now, is that not a contract which 
has been broken on the one side in the worst possible 
way? Are they twain one flesh? Is that for better 
and for worse?" 

Bishop of Birmingham: "Yes, I am afraid so." 

Lady Francis Balfour : "And is that wife to stick 
to that husband, she being a Christian, and to do as 
he commands her?" 

Bishop of Birmingham: "Yes, I am afraid so." 

WHAT WOULD MEN HAVE DONE? 

That's all, gentlemen. You and I will go. 
There will be other witnesses and days of testimony. 
But isn't this enough? What would you yourselves 
do if your church and your state handed you over 
body and soul, like this, to any other human being 
to have and to hold and to exercise this power and 
dominion over you? I don't believe you'd ever stop 
at all to parade and respectfully to petition about it. 
I think you'd be mobbing and rioting and bombing 
right away. And if they had arrested you and put 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 367 

you in Holloway Jail, you'd have raised the roof 
and torn down the whole social structure! 

Well, in England women broke windows. In 
Germany, as I have said, they broke more. "Your 
statutes have limited the liberties of the woman who 
marries. Then you shall never limit us," was the 
gauntlet thrown down to society by the extremists. 
They were university women, some of them with 
doctor of philosophy degrees, who scathingly refused 
the ring and faced free love instead. They were 
quite frank about it — and quite fearless. I have 
talked with them there in Berlin. They looked at 
me as clear eyed, when they told me of what they 
had done, as any women who have walked ringed 
and veiled down a church aisle into legal wedlock. 
Well, they seemed to think it was the only way, to 
act directly instead of to agitate. 

And they got out the book of the church ritual 
that they had repudiated. And they turned to a 
paragraph and said to me, Read. And I read: 
"The woman's will, as God says, shall be subject to 
the man and he shall be her master: that is, the 
woman shall not live according to her free will . . . 
and must neither begin nor complete anything with- 
out the man. Where he is, there must she be and 
bend before him as her master, whom she shall fear 
and to whom she shall be subject and obedient." 

So I write it here, gentlemen, for you to see. And 
again, I submit, What would you do if they had 
said it that way to you? Be fair. Could any ring 
have held you"? 



368 WOMEN WANTED 

It was natural, I think, that revolt should be most 
bitter in England and in Germany, the two countries 
where women were driven to the verge of despera- 
tion. A Frenchman may hold the reins of his au- 
thority so gaily that a woman with skill evades them. 
And the dear American man will pass them right 
over to you if you're a woman of any judgment and 
finesse at all. But in those lands where a wife must 
not only promise to obey, but also they made her, the 
eruption was due. Action and reaction are equal in 
the old law of physics, and you can pretty accurately 
measure the rebound by that. It was because the 
ring hurt worse in Germany than anywhere else in 
the world, that they just tore it off. But the mar- 
riage strike that was started in Germany wasn't 
staying there. 

In nearby Sweden, a woman who is a very promi- 
nent lawyer and a man who is a university professor, 
decided to do with an announcement in a newspaper 
instead of a ceremony in a church — and the lady 
remains a lawyer. It was the only way that she 
could. The law of that land places the woman, on 
the day that she marries, under her husband's guard- 
ianship, and pronounces her incompetent thereafter 
to act as an attorney in court ! The newspaper an- 
nouncement as it is now used in Scandinavia is 
called the "conscience marriage." 

There were also Anglo-Saxon women who had 
rebelled. In London, an Oxford graduate who had 
done with window breaking told me quite candidly 
that she was living what she called the "unorthodox 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 369 

life." And there were others in her particular Lon- 
don suburb. In New York City, even, there are 
women who have preferred the ''free union." 

You see how near it was to being wrecked, this an 
institution more revered by society than all of the 
cathedrals and art galleries. Only this war, prob- 
ably, could have averted the disaster. Now this 
new woman, with her wage envelope and her vote, 
has become articulate. She can speak as one who 
can pay the rent, about how "we" shall live. 

Oh, it's not either Hampstead or Long Island. 
Never mind for a while whether the lace curtains 
will be long enough or shall the floors be done over. 
Yesterday her domain was the home. To-day it's 
the wide, wide world to be set to order. For the 
first time she's facing her destiny, with the right to 
decide more than the parlour carpet or her satin slip- 
pers or even her sociological principles. 

How "we" shall live and love together, is the 
question for consultation. And there is statute and 
dogma and custom and convention and tradition to 
be done over. These have been handed down until 
they are many of them past all usefulness. Some of 
them are moth-eaten and quite outworn. None of 
them, please note this, gentlemen, none of them is 
of her selection. Just think of that. There's not a 
code in the world that was formulated by a woman. 
The creeds that have come from Rome and Witten- 
berg and Westminster were not even submitted for 
woman's inspection. And marriage was made for 
her by law courts and church councils to which she 



370 WOMEN WANTED 

was not even asked. There was not so much as a 
by-your-leave to the lady, in the matter of her most 
intimate personal concern. Oh, isn't this clearly 
where the reconstruction of civilisation shall com- 
mence ? 

MAKING OVER MARRIAGE 

Only for the man in khaki to come home again it 
waits. Then with the new woman, together at last, 
they can build the new world aright. For never 
again shall we permit any such skewed and twisted 
and one-sided job as that of the past. "Dear," she 
will say, "you did it as well as you could, probably, 
that old world. But the trouble was, that you did 
it alone." 

And with a little whimsical smile, she'll quote for 
him the old proverb that "two heads are better than 
one." Then perhaps they will walk in the garden 
in the evening. And with her hand in his arm, she 
will speak as she never could speak before — as a 
free woman who has found her soul! There were 
things, I think, that God forgot when he talked to 
Moses and to St. Paul. But now he's told them to 
her. 

Listen: "Marriage," she will say, "marriage, 
dear, we must make over so that it shall be some- 
thing very sweet and very sacred." 

Oh, it wasn't always that yesterday. There are 
women who know it wasn't. When a man could 
say to the woman the law gave to him, "Come unto 
me to-night, or I shall not give you money with 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 371 

which to buy shoes for the children to-morrow.' ' Or 
he may have said, "the slippers for your pretty feet" 
— when marriage was that way, everything in it 
divine just died ! It shall never be so again. 

Hear the new woman. "We shall have more love 
about marriage and less law," she will say. "And 
we shall never let them lock us in. Love always 
laughed even yesterday at the clumsy locksmiths 
who thought they had bolted and barred the Doll's 
House with ordinance and ritual. For how love 
cometh, we may not say, who are mute before so 
much as the mystery of the tint of the rose or the 
perfume of the lilies in June. Nor how love goeth, 
dare we define. Presumptuous mortals who have 
thought to hold back love with law and enactment, 
have made of marriage an empty form, echoing with 
the mockery of the happiness that fled." 

Well, we will say that she is talking like this under 
the stars. The next morning at breakfast she will 
come right to the point. And I know where she 
will begin. "That old doctrine of coverture," she 
will say, "take it away !" There is a place for the 
relics of an antiquated civilisation. In the museum 
of the Tower of London they have in a glass case 
the little model of the rack and thumb screw. The 
executioner's block and the headsman's axe is an im- 
portant and impressive exhibit. And there are the 
coats of mail of early warriors. It is customary, I 
believe, to put there all things that are passing into 
desuetude: a hansom cab went in the other day. 
Now let them take also this ancient doctrine of cov- 



372 WOMEN WANTED 

erture, and put it in a glass case for future genera- 
tions to wonder at its barbarity. Then may the mar- 
riage contract be rewritten with a really free hand. 

How it will be done all over the world, we even 
at present may prophesy. See already Scandinavia. 
The northern sky was alight with the forecast of 
woman's freedom, even before this war broke. Con* 
temporaneously with the enfranchisement of women 
up there, completed in Denmark only in 1915, al- 
most the first act of governments in which all of the 
people were for the first time represented, was to 
appoint a marriage commission. On it are both 
men and women from the three lands, Norway, Den- 
mark, and Sweden. It is still at work revising the 
marriage laws. The task is not completed. But 
there are important sections of the new code ready: 
they have taken the "obey" out of the marriage serv- 
ice ; they have stipulated for divorce by mutual con- 
sent, that is by request of the parties interested, who 
are to be let out of wedlock as simply and as easily 
as they were let in. Further personal rights and 
property rights are all being defined and arranged 
on the new basis of equality of morality and duty 
and responsibility and on the assumption that the 
wife is a separate personality from her husband. 

The nearby country of Finland, where the woman 
movement has always kept step with Scandinavia, 
has also taken similar action. The Law Committee 
of the Finnish Parliament had in 1917 appealed to 
local authorities and other qualified bodies for sug- 
gestions on the subject of the reform of the marriage 






THE RING AND THE WOMAN 373 

laws. Seven women's associations united in formu- 
lating the pronouncement which was returned. 
There is no paragraph about divorce for the reason 
that Finland has already accomplished divorce by- 
mutual consent. For the rest, it is probably the 
most complete presentment available of the new 
woman's point of view. This is what she asks: — 

1. That the guardianship of the husband shall 
cease, and the married woman have an equal right 
of action in all legal matters, even against her hus- 
band ; that she shall have the right to plead in courts 
of law and to carry on business independently. 

2. That the married couple shall have equal re- 
sponsibilities and rights as regards the children and 
provide for them together. 

3. That the husband and wife shall have equal 
right to represent the family in public matters. If 
either party uses this right improperly, it can be 
taken from him or her by the courts on the demand 
of the other party. 

4. If either husband or wife should be a cause of 
danger to the other, the party who is endangered 
shall have the right to separate from the other. The 
courts shall be empowered to decide whether the cir- 
cumstances are such as to entitle the complaining 
party to receive maintenance. 

5. That if a married couple separates, the party 
who retains the care of the child shall decide the 
question of the child's education. If this right be 
misused, the other party shall have the right to 
appeal to the courts for rectification. 



374 WOMEN WANTED 

6. That if any labour contract or business be con- 
ducted by one of the parties to the detriment of the 
family, the other party shall have the right of appeal 
to the courts with the object of annulling the con- 
tract or forbidding the business. 

7. That in regard to the property of married 
couples, there shall be three possible alternative 
methods of arrangement: (a) Joint possession in 
the case of earned income, (b) Joint possession of 
every description of property, (c) Separation of 
property. 

8. Several points must be taken into consideration 
in regard to the working of these different methods 
of arrangement: (a) That the distinction between 
real and other descriptions of property shall cease, 
(b) That each party shall have control over his or 
her separate property and the income derived from it 
and over all earned income, (c) That each party 
shall be bound to contribute to the maintenance of 
the family in proportion to his or her means, either 
in work or in financial resource, (d) That in case 
of joint possession, the whole income, earned or un- 
earned, of each party shall belong to the common 
family fund, (e) That in the case of joint posses- 
sion, both parties shall have equal rights of disposi- 
tion. These rights shall be used by them jointly in 
such a manner that neither party shall be able to 
dispose of the property without the consent of the 
other, and no transaction can take place without the 
consent of both parties, (f) That the party who 
gives the chief labour and attention to the home shall 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 375 

have a due share of the common property and of the 
earned income, with full power to defray his or her 
personal expenses and those of the home. 

9. Before marriage, the contracting parties shall 
agree on which of the three systems the property 
shall be arranged. This agreement shall be capable 
of alteration after marriage with due legal formali- 
ties and safeguards. 

10. Husband and wife shall inherit from each 
other on the same footing with the children. 

This memorial from the Finnish women coincides 
perfectly in spirit with the new laws in process of 
construction for Scandinavia. When the Dutch 
Parliament, which has just conferred a new measure 
of suffrage on the women of the Netherlands, was in 
1917 debating the matter, an alarmed reactionary 
rose to object : "But how can married women vote*? 
For married women are not free. They are like sol- 
diers in barracks, who have lost the liberty to express 
their thoughts." 

THE NEW FATHERHOOD 

Sir, that's just the point. But the liberty that 
was lost, is found. No one, as we have seen, is 
going to compel this new woman to be anything that 
she does not want to be. Let us not forget this now 
as she goes on talking. For she is coming presently 
to that which is at the heart of the whole woman 
question, nay, more, the human question. 

"Dear," she is going to say, "there is that which 
matters more than all the rest for us now to decide. 



376 WOMEN WANTED 

It's the children, the children are on my mind." 
Then she is going to emphasise how important it is 
that parenthood shall be equalised. By the laws 
that men have made about it, quite universally, 
equally in fact in England and Germany and France 
and Italy and Russia and the United States, the 
father is the only parent. His will decides its reli- 
gion, its education, and all of the conditions under 
which the child shall be reared. There are a few of 
the United States, most notably those where women 
vote and one or two others in which pressure has been 
brought to bear by the feminists, where the law has 
been corrected. Also in Scandinavia and in Aus- 
tralia, as soon as women have come into the vote, 
one of their first efforts has been to establish what is 
known as ''equal guardianship," the right of a mar- 
ried mother to her own child. To an unmarried 
mother, by a strange perversity in the statutes of 
men, is conceded not only all the right to the child 
but there is put upon her all of the responsibility of 
its parenthood. 

The new woman is not going to rest content to 
have it stand that way. Already the world is being 
forced to a new deal for childhood. The sins of the 
fathers are being lifted from the children on whom 
society in the past has so heavily visited them. A 
baby has broken no law. Why brand it, then, as 
"illegitimate"? War babies crying in all lands 
have brought statesmen to startled attention. Gov- 
ernment after government has arranged for what is 
called the "separation allowance" to go to the woman 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 377 

at home to whom the soldier at the front knows that 
it belongs — even though she has no marriage lines to 
show. So the War Office pen writes off one discrim- 
ination. Of children who used to be called "illegiti- 
mate," 50,000 born annually in England and 180,- 
000 born annually in Germany will now be entitled 
to start life with equal financial government aid that 
the others get. 

It is the first step in the direction of the new ar- 
rangements about parenthood. The polite fiction 
that used to pass, that there were any children with- 
out fathers, is going to be ruled out of court. Of all 
the laws that have been written that evidence the 
difference in the point of view of men and women, 
see the illegitimacy laws. Napoleon put it in his 
code "La recherche de la paternite est interdite" 
and it was only in 1913 that the feminists of France, 
led by Margaret Durand, succeeded in getting that 
edict modified so that a woman in France is no 
longer "forbidden" to look for the father of her 
child. Up in Norway, where women vote, they put 
on the statute books in 1915 a very different law: 
it commands that the father of the child shall be 
found. This is the famous law framed by Johan 
Castberg, minister of justice, and inspired by his 
sister-in-law, Fru Kathe Anker Moler. The draft 
of the bill was submitted in advance to the women's 
clubs of the country : the National Women's Council 
of Norway stamped it with the seal of approval. So 
that there can be no doubt but that it has put the 
matter as a woman thinketh. Even the title of the 



378 WOMEN WANTED 

new law significantly omits all objectionable refer- 
ence: it is a "Law Concerning Children whose Par- 
ents have not Married Each Other." They are 
equally entitled to a father's name and support and 
to an inheritance in his property as are any other 
kind of children. The father must be found ! Not 
even if the paternity is a matter of doubt among 
three men or six men or any several men, can any of 
them, or all of them, escape behind "exceptio plu- 
rium" which in other lands affords them protection. 
In Norway, they are every one of them a party to the 
possible obligation. And the financial responsibility 
of fathering the child in question is distributed pro 
rata among them. What the Norwegian law accom- 
plishes, you see, is the abolition of anonymous pater- 
nity. 

Like this, there is a great deal in the laws and the 
religion and the public opinion of the world of yes- 
terday that will need revision. Lastly, there is that 
which is of more significance than all the rest. Way 
back in the beginning of things, the lady who was 
called Eve, you remember as the Sunday school 
lesson ran, got the world into a lot of trouble, it 
was said, by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowl- 
edge. Too little knowledge, some one else has told 
us, may prove a dangerous thing. But there is a 
Latin proverb on which a school of therapeutics is 
founded, "Similia similibus curantur" Then, if 
"like cures like," what we need to-day is more 
knowledge to make right the ancient wrong that 
afflicts the earth ! Well, we have it. 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 379 

THE WHISPER OF GOD 

This new woman will look back into the dear eyes 
that search hers. In her level glance there will flash 
an understanding of life that never was in woman's 
eyes before in all the ages of sorrow since the angel 
fixed up the flaming swords that shut her out of 
Eden. For in the white silence where she has found 
her soul, she has heard even the closest whisper of 
God. If man before missed it, why, maternity was 
naturally the matter that he could not know and 
could not understand. This is the new revelation, 
that maternity shall be made more divine! There 
has been a halo about it in song and picture and 
story. But we want to put a halo on in London's 
east end and New York's east side. Creation itself 
is to be corrected. 

Doesn't it need to be? See how many men, it is 
being discovered to-day, are not well enough made 
for soldiers. England is obliged to reject 25% of 
her men as physically unfit. America is reported to 
have rejected 29%. The other nations cannot show 
any better figures. If in the great arsenals that are 
manufacturing munitions of war, one shell in four 
turned out was spoiled, the industry would have to 
be at once investigated and put on a more efficient 
basis than that. Quite likely the mistake might be 
discovered to be "speeding up." There had been an 
effort to turn out too many shells. If fewer shells 
are made, they can be better made. And you will 
get just as many in the end. For by the present 



380 WOMEN WANTED 

process, all these shells that fail, you see, do not 
count in the real output. 

It's just like this about people. We've been try- 
ing to have too many. When Mrs. Smith in Lon- 
don or in New York or Frau Schmidt in Berlin, has 
six or eight or more children in, say, two rooms, 
some of them are going to have rickets and some of 
them are going to have tuberculosis and some of them 
are going into penal institutions. So that when you 
come to want them for the army, you find that one 
in four has failed. Why, even chickens would. A 
poultry fancier does not presume to try to raise a 
brood of chickens in quarters too crowded for their 
development. He measures his poultry house and 
determines how many chickens he can accommodate 
with enough air and space — and how many he can 
afford to feed. He limits the flock accordingly. 
Mrs. Smith in London or New York and Frau 
Schmidt in Berlin, can too ! 

Fire and electricity and other useful forces we have 
long since obtained the mastery over and turned from 
a menace to a blessing to mankind. But another 
even mightier force has ravaged the world like un- 
chained lightning. Because it has not been con- 
trolled. Men thought that it must not be. So the 
fear of its consequences has haunted homes in every 
land since the pronouncement, "I will greatly multi- 
ply thy conceptions." All of the great religious 
teachers said that you must not take the misery out 
of maternity. It was meant to be there. And sci- 
ence, which had accomplished miracles in mitigating 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 381 

other suffering, stood afar off from the woman in 
childbirth. So much as an anaesthetic to deaden the 
pain was forbidden, until quite recent times, as an 
interference with the will of the Almighty. It was 
Queen Elizabeth of England who broke that taboo. 
By virtue of her royal authority, she demanded chlo- 
roform. And got it. Her daring could then, of 
course, be followed by other women. Newer icono- 
clasts are calling for twilight sleep, that achieves 
maternity in a dream. Add birth control. And we 
shall be out of the trouble in which the unhappy 
lady called Eve so long ago involved all of her 
daughters. 

Birth control means, instead of a maternity that 
is perpetual, unregulated and haphazard and miser- 
able, a maternity that is intelligently directed and 
limited. So that it shall be volitional. The rising 
value of a baby at last requires that people shall be 
as carefully produced as the shells we are making 
with such infinite accuracy. Most of all, it is im- 
portant that there shall not be too many babies lest 
some of them not well done shall be only worthless 
and good for nothing. You see, you have to think 
about quality as well as quantity when you are 
counting for a final output. Russia, which had a 
birth rate of 50 per thousand, the highest birth rate 
in Europe, is the nation whose military defences have 
crumpled like paper. It was France, with a birth 
rate of 28 per thousand, the lowest in Europe, that 
held the line for civilisation at the Marne. And it 
was Germany, which has always imposed on its 



382 WOMEN WANTED 

women as a national service the speeding up of popu- 
lation, that plunged the world into the agony of this 
war. Because 55% of the families of Berlin live in 
one-room tenements and there is not where to put 
the babies that have kept on coming, Germany 
reached out for the territory of her neighbours. The 
pressure of population too large for too narrow 
boundaries is as certain in its consequences as is the 
pressure of steam in a tea kettle with the spout 
stopped up. There's sure to be an explosion. Ger- 
many exploded. Back of her military system, it is 
her maternity system that is responsible for the woe 
of the world to-day. It's plain that the way not to 
have war anywhere ever again is not to have too 
many babies ! 

John Stuart Mill, the great economist who two 
generations ago looked into the future and saw a 
vision of the woman movement that would be, said: 
"Little advance can be expected in morality until 
the production of large families is regarded in the 
same light as drunkenness or any other physical 
excess." And he added: "Among the probable 
consequences of the industrial and social independ- 
ence of women, I predict a great diminution of the 
evil of overpopulation." John Stuart Mill meant 
Mrs. Webber and Mrs. Smith. Two children to be 
enjoyed instead of ten to be endured, is an ideal of 
family policy possible of attainment even in the east 
ends and the east sides of the world. For to Mrs. 
Webber or to Mrs. Smith, handling her own wage 



THE RING AND THE WOMAN 383 

envelope, no one any more may say, "I shall not 
give you money for shoes to-morrow unless — " Vo- 
litional motherhood is the final truth that shall make 
women free. No one can compel the new woman 
to be anything that she does not wish to be, not even 
to be a mother until she chooses the time. 

After that curse pronounced upon Eve, there was 
a promise: "The seed of the woman shall bruise 
the serpent's head !" "We can do it, dear." That's 
what the new woman will say triumphantly to the 
man who comes back to her from the Great War. 
Together they will take up the task of making, not 
only a new earth, but a new race ! 

And I think he will be glad for what she tells him. 
The wonder is, not so much that women in the past 
were willing to endure the "subjection of women," 
but that men consented to it. A bird in a cage can 
of course be made to eat out of the hand of the 
owner who feeds it. But see the bird that is free 
and will come at your call ! 

The women in industry and commerce and the 
professions and in government, whom we are seeing 
in these years of war passing all barriers, will at last 
make their final stand for what*? It is for happi- 
ness. Look ! Even now, who has the vision to dis- 
cern, may discover the gates of Eden swinging wide. 
And when the man in khaki, with the age-old yearn- 
ing in his heart, "Woman wanted, my woman," 
comes back to clasp her in his arms once more, these 
two everywhere shall enter in. For the ultimate 



384 WOMEN WANTED 

programme toward which the modern woman move- 
ment to-day is moving is no less than paradise re- 
gained ! It may even, I think, have been worth this 
war to be there. 



THE END 



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